Social Media Debate: Print is Dead Dying.

Jun 16, 2009

In 1997, I can recall my older sisters saying how cumbersome email was.

In 1999, I can recall high school classmates saying that Napster will never replace music CD’s.

In 2005, I remember friends saying how stupid Facebook is.

Today, I hear business associates saying that print is well positioned.

Advertising

And these are probably the same people that say Microsoft cannot fail, that Google will always be the dominate search engine, and do not get the value of Twitter.

Though we have yet to see the later three statements proven false and may never, it is this same mentality that causes business to be in a continuous state of “catch-up”. We’ve seen this in the multiple industries disrupted by innovation and changing consumer behavior. Gannett should have created Blogger, NBC should have created YouTube, and Yellowpages should have created Yelp.

I’m not defending the value of Twitter as a lead generating service for the apartment industry as of today. And I am not saying that Twitter, FriendFeed, or Facebook is the next platform that will change the way we find apartments. But I think it is a mistake to make all decisions based on measurable results.

Here is why:

1) It takes time to build and adapt to new technologies.

There is a learning curve involved. You cannot just get a PageRank of 9 overnight. You cannot build a network of followers for your blog with one post. You cannot build your online content presence by creating a Facebook Fanpage.

2) Social Media is also an engagement, communication, and customer service tool.

Not all results of customer service are immediately measurable. I do not need to defend the value of transparency; we all use UCG and review sites everyday. But I feel like I need to convey this… The way we (consumers) communicate, interact, and consume information is changing and for the most part, has changed. The social web, reviews, and UGC influence our purchasing decisions.

Would you stop using your phone because it does not provide a way to effectively market to consumers? Now replace the words, “your phone” with “social media”.

Conclusion

Newspapers have a daily circulation of over 40 million with 39% of people read newspapers. Print is still providing significant results. There is no doubt that print should be a main source of advertising for many companies.

However, the proportion that read just the print version of a newspaper fell by a quarter, from 34% to 25% over the two-year period. Within the week, hundreds of thousands will stop reading. Within a few months, millions will stop reading. Within 10 years, the industry may not exist at all. Though print may not be dead, it is definitely dying.

Matt D says:

June 16, 2009 at 12:22 pm

There does seem to be a lot of brainstorming as to exactly how social media can play a role in the apartment industry.

After all, there are 100 million facebook users (worldwide) that login to facebook everyday. about 6 million or so twitter accounts (you guys have a number on active?*) and a general online acceptance of social media across the internet.

with 37 million renter households in the U.S. it really is just a matter of finding that intersection in the venn diagram of people looking for apartments and social networking functionality. I think that our (MyNewPlace) Facebook connect functionality is a big cornestone in that middle section, there, but can also expand.

Consumers want to make informed decisions, and to a large extent they trust the people who are in the same position as they are (other consumers) as much or more as the information they are getting from the people selling to them.

*there seem to be a lot of people who sign up for twitter and never post and update or fade out rather quickly and I haven’t been able to find a good estimation of active twitter users. although some have suggested that looking at total followers for twitter’s most popular suggested “to follow” (CNN, eddie murphy, King Gustavus Adolphus, etc) can give a good approximation, since this action occurs with registration it does not give a good insight into continued activity. the number of tweets, i think around 2,147,483,647, according to techcrunch’s twitpocalpyse post, is obviously confounded by outliers.

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