I frequently say that digital media and digital marketing is not about the tool. It’s not about Twitter or Facebook or YouTube. It’s about the fact that communication — and how people get their information — are changing.
People don’t get their information from the daily newspaper, get their local paper — if you’re lucky and live in a big city you get the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times or Chicago Tribune — or go out to the local store and purchase a newspaper and read whatever’s in their paper. Rarely pay attention to who the journalist is that wrote the piece. Or are lucky to read papers like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal with an amazing array of editorial writers.
In today’s digital age, people don’t look for news. News comes at them and to them — at an amazing, rapid rate. Millions of people are getting their news from links on Twitter – whether retweets or posts from their friends or network, celebrities like Ashton Kutcher with 4.8 million followers, corporate accounts, or news sites like CNN with over 3 million followers. Twitter is a news source.
People find out about what’s happening in the because they see a link posted on Facebook or Twitter. A recent study by some Korean researchers argued that Twitter is less like a social network and more like a news source; Twitter is the new CNN.
This was also discussed at Israel’s Com.Vention, the country’s largest annual Internet convention. At one of the sessions, with Robert Scoble, and several high tech executives, about digital content creation, it was mentioned by one of the speakers that today, because we get our information at us — and not dependent on any media outlet — journalists are dependent on their own personal brand. Instead of getting our news from a print newspaper, we read journalist’s — people who have credibility and write quality, regardless of what degree they have or what outlets they write — blogs – whose links we found on Twitter or were shared on Facebook.
I apologize that the sound is not very good, as I took this video from my cell phone. Start at 2:00 in particular, where it talks about how journalism and content consumption and creation is changing, and especially at 3:00 where the speaker talks about the “Brand of Me.”