SPJSM: Social Media v/s Traditional Media

The social media is extremely drastic change over traditional media as it signifies a paradigm shift, traditional marketing dabbled with one-to-many approach where the brand house created a messages which was transmitted across audiences. This built one-way communication with less focus on word-of-mouth publicity.  Research shows that word of mouth is the most powerful method for longer customer retention. Social media encompassing two-way communication helps to build just that. It is not a traditional sales medium but a relationship building platform. It focuses on engagement and not just on eyeballs. One change which has germinated from a shift in consumer behavior is that consumers don’t believe in brands anymore, and this might be one of the factors owing to which the one-way messages mightn’t yield the expected results.

Social media also helps in ideation via crowdsourcing and responding to the customer more accurately and quickly by being closer to them. Social media is inbound, while traditional media is outbound, this nature also gives ready-to-be-tracked matrices which are measurable in nature. This is also coupled by the fact that the marketers can spot trends early on using analytics and can take immediate steps to realign campaigns. All is not rosy in the field of social media, one of the sore factors is rapid dissemination of the impact created by the campaigns while the promotions via traditional media carry higher tangibility. For any firm, relevance is paramount and a proper social profile can help bump the relevance ratings on Google and Bing, but this closeness comes with a caveat as people can create and share content which might prove detrimental and the marketers have no control over it.

In conclusion I would like state that one can’t avoid the social media channel any longer as it has become the need of the hour, but one needs to enter into the space with a clear conscience and a willingness to collaborate and co-create to utilize it as a two-way reciprocal platform

~Submitted By

Vivaswan Pathak (PGP-14-155)