02 Oct Notes from an Intern: The social media revolution
I am in my first week at RONIN marketing and I have learnt so much about the digital world.
I have always been rather troglodyte about the so-called digital revolution. After previously being the editor of my weekly student newspaper I had attended many discussions on the survival of print-media in the emergence of digitalised media platforms. At all these debates I would fervently defend the humble text-on-paper option. Yet, with most of us tuned in online getting minute-by-minute updates, picking up a newspaper is more often than not, old news.
A week, a Twitter and a LinkedIn account later, it became startlingly clear that I have been missing out on an essential portion of digitalised everyday life – and am now kicking myself for not exploiting these platforms earlier.
And it’s not just me – the very nature of the media business is changing.
As everything moves online or is digitalised in some form, it seems that traditional media is struggling. With the future of print media hanging in the balance, TV, it seems might also have to evolve. With the invention of IPTV, it appears that TV is set to lose its monopoly on advertising revenue that it once had. WPP’s Sir Martin Sorrell, speaking at the Royal Televisions Society’s Cambridge Convention, predicted that the proportion of advertisers moving online will increase from 17 per cent to a third: “TV, if we are honest, never moves fast enough [to embrace digital],” he says.
The importance of businesses having an online strategy and joining the digital revolution has never been more apparent.
By Amy Rose King