Columbus Ohio Website Design and Affordable Small Business Marketing

- By Tricia M. Williams

Every day we hear about more and more companies that are -for lack of a better term- biting the dust.  We read the stories, send out an empathetic well wish to the people who lost their jobs, and go on about our lives until tomorrow, when another story breaks and we do it all again. Just the other day (thanks to Twitter I might add) I read that Modern Bride, Elegant Bride and Gourmet magazines were soon to cease publishing, as well as the local newspaper from my hometown. The news of the demise of four printed publications, especially a news publication, left me pondering exactly why it is that print media seems to be so doomed nowadays.

We need news now more than ever with so much going on with the world that it seems crazy to think that papers are faltering. Every day I walk onto the campus of my college and pick up the student newspaper to find out about the shenanigans happening on campus. I like the smell of the paper, and the way it makes me feel smart and smug. The bad thing about the paper is it’s content- by the time I pick it up on the way to class, the news stories are a bit outdated. How can that be, when it’s a fresh issue? The answer is simple- social media. Social media is an instant news feed and has taken on the print media giants like meteor barreling toward Earth: It’s coming at you fast, it’s coming at you strong and it’s going to have a huge impact that changes everything. For example- two weeks ago I went to pick up a book at the book store and was greeted by a cop guarding the front door that was covered with crime scene tape. A little disturbed and miffed about not getting my book, I instantly turned to my Twitter Feed to see if any of my classmates had the inside scoop on the story. Within 10 minutes of leaving the scene of the crime I had found that it was robbed at gunpoint by two men wearing black and gray sweatshirts who escaped in a purple SUV. The conversation about the incident was voluminous, and soon it felt as if I had been there to witness the robbery myself. So the next day, when I picked up my paper, I simply skipped over the article because I already knew what was going on. When an earthquake happened in California last year, Twitter accounts posted news of the quake a full eight minutes before the news broke on TV. And when US Airways Flight 1549 crashed in the Hudson River, a Twitter-er was the first to report the mayhem.

The point of my story is that social media is so instant and so fast that print media is beginning to seem archaic. If news breaks on Twitter or Facebook, people are rarely going to wait for the newspaper that hits their stoop the next morning to find out the details. Social and online media sources are simply more accessible and more convenient then waiting around for news or for product information to be published. News feeds are quicker and sexier. And the proof is in the pudding- check out www.trendistic.com which tracks trends on Twitter.  Do a search for a pop culture event that happened recently and see the spike in Tweets just mentioning that person or event around the time the news worthy event happened.. We tried Patrick Swayze, Michael Jackson and Braylon Edwards and sure enough, the days that those men were in the news, the Twitter conversations mentioning them spiked. People are going to social media networks and to online newspaper sources to get instant information that newspapers and magazines just can not compete with, as hard as they try. And when you can’t keep up with your competition, you fold. So as more print media sources fold, we’ll keep reading about it on Twitter, and the viscious cycle will continue, just like the world turns every day. It’s just going to turn faster than we ever imagined.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at 11:16 am and is filed under Social Media Columbus Ohio Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.