Weekly Furniture World Media Note #19 from Lance Hanish-Mobile First: How New Media Overtook Legacy Media

Don’t be afraid. Adapt.

We live in a new DNAge. Because of that, changes abound. The term ‘New Media’ implies that there will be a time in the future when social media becomes the ‘old media’ and the Legacy Media of today (newspaper, television, radio, magazine, direct mail) will become an ancient form of communication, like hieroglyphics on the walls of our minds.

Kyle Lacy set all of this into prospective. He said, “On September 3rd, 1786, a man from Peter’s Creek, PA, wrote to his local newspaper, commenting that “I see by your last paper that you have not crammed with news. “The Pittsburgh Gazette had been printing the news since July 29th of that same year, but Gilbert Gichen was the first to have his comments on the newspaper published for other readers to see.

While this was not the first newspaper in the United States (the first continuous publication was The Boston News-Letter in 1704), it did play a significant role in print journalism.

In our New Media era (social media, blogging, online journalism), Gilbert Gichen’s contribution seems somewhat trivial. In the days of Legacy Media, Gichen was a trailblazer; a fresh dissenting voice. It was this type of criticism that birthed media as we see it today-a tightly woven network of professional journalism and public contribution.

Imagine waiting a month to learn that Justin Timberlake got engaged to Jessica Biel or even that the United State had gone to war with Iraq. When America was still fighting for its independence, that’s about how long it took (at the minimum) for a message to cross the 3,000-mile span from Southampton to New York City. For this, and many other reasons, the types of information in which we’re interested has been changed and fostered in the age of social media. Topics of the past had to not only be newsworthy, they had to have a long shelf life. Social Media overtook Legacy Media by changing both the way information was presented and the information itself. In the Boston News-Letter what your dog ate this morning would hardly make news. But on sites like Facebook, such stories comprise a vast amount of the information on the site.”

When you think of the success of sites like Twitter, you see countless bite sized snippets of information. In New Media, that’s what readers have come to expect. We want short, punchy pieces of valuable content because our time is valuable.

Before Social Media, emphasis was placed on extensive works created by experts. In contrast, Social Media has over taken Legacy Media by offering the following:

First: Anyone can publish their ideas or opinions on thousands of social sites or networks, becoming their own publisher.

Second: There is a large audience interested in such information.

Third: Creating an internationally published work online is much less expensive than an internationally released book would have been in the past. A Pew Internet study found that approximately 75% of people get their news from social networking sites (as opposed to other means like newspapers and television), while around 52% of people regularly post news topics or articles to Social Media networks.

The December 2011 Awareness survey indicated that management understood the importance of Social Media. Sixty-Nine (69%) percent of marketers say increased presence across social media platforms is their top area of corporate social media marketing investment for this hear, up ten (10%) percent over a robust social marketing last year.

So what does this have to do with mobile?

More and more, New Media is being transmitted via mobile. Mobile is the instrument from which Social Media is played.

Think MOBILEFirst.