A New Marketing

Allow me to start this off by blowing your mind.

Just about all media is social media.

That being said (and minds being blown), not all media is as intrinsically social as one another. I’ve broken down most types into 4 categories. Let’s take a look!

Socially Passive Media
This is the traditional stuff. The mass media that everyone’s used to. Most TV shows, movies, books, newspapers, and magazines are one-way streets, but that doesn’t mean they exist in complete isolation. They have to pay attention to the way people “vote” with their money and time. If a magazine is poorly written or becomes irrelevant, people are going to stop buying and reading it. And magazines don’t last long if no one reads them. Same goes for TV shows, if that new over-hyped sitcom tanks, then it gets pulled off the air.

This type of media isn’t directly socially influenced. But at the very bottom line, if people aren’t watching,reading, listening, or (most importantly) buying, it’s not going to last long.

Socially Influenced Media
Now here is an interesting mix. Socially Influenced Media is usually a traditional media form that has been tweaked in some way to “give the power to the people”. Think letters to the editor, American Idol, Dancing With The Stars, or Jim Cramer’s Mad Money. At this level, the actual outcome is determined by the audience at large (as opposed to the above in which just the media being presented is determined)

This is a big step, because it represents the swing of control from “them” to “us”. We still don’t have any say as to what kind of competition it is, or whether we talk about stocks or bonds. What we do have, however, is the ability to make a noticeable difference.

Socially Highlighted Media
Ahhhh, Feels good to be back in the comfort zone, doesn’t it? Socially Highlighted Media is the beginning of what most of us think about when we think “social media”. What makes the distinction here, is that “we” decide what gets noticed, featured, or promoted. We put stories on the front page of Digg, Mixx, and reddit. We submit sites to StumbleUpon or delicious. If we decide stories about the government in Mozambique are important, then they are.

Socially Created Media
This is the rest of what encompasses the traditional view of “social media”. Blogs, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook profiles, Posterous, Tumblr, etc. all fit into this category. The focus here is that as the type of media is created, it’s intrinsically social. Blogs, pictures, and profiles all live on the web. They’re “born social”.

The Socially Created Media category is one that’s growing and changing incredibly fast. It’s creating new categories i.e. Microblogging (remember a time before Twitter?) and starting to absorb elements from other types of media. Webisodes, and even entire shows, now live on the web. This category has the most potential, and it’ll be interesting to see how this continues to evolve.