Social Media – You Becoming the Media
As a media specialist for for 30 years I can tell you that these are amazing times. No longer does anyone have to rely on traditional media, paper, radio or TV … the internet has changed that forever.
Back in the late 1990’s I did a series of radio shows and portrayed The Internet officially as the fourth media. A medium that would transform the media as we have knew it. Transform was an understatement!
Today “social media” allows anyone to in fact “become the media” themselves. Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Twitter etc are all social media sites, where we share stories, pictures, links etc. No different than paper, radio and TV, sharing news stories, pictures, video, music, social chatter etc.
The difference today is that at almost zero expense you can reach a global marketplace from your very own laptop, using social media. You have thus become the media itself! Now just how powerful is that? Just as you needed a bricks and mortar store or even eBay to sell your products under one roof, you can now do all that yourself through your own website or blog. Don’t think all the traditional media aren’t freaked out, and worried about all this power you and I now have.
As a media specialist for many years I always talked about targeting products to niche markets using paper, radio and TV. Target yes, but still relying on the content of the media being used. If you didn’t listen to that radio station or read that newspaper, you would never see or hear my targeted ad. Now I can find that targeted ad as soon as I type my search query into Google. Now that is as targeted as you’ll ever get and better still, targeted to a global audience to boot.
This is huge media power in your very hands and it should make traditional media nervous, very very nervous. So essentially, stop trying to figure out how to best use existing media, and become the media yourself. Here’s a clue, notice that all the traditional media are all using social media! Hmmmmm
Mastering social media is extremely important, and some will have you believe is virtually impossible to master. They are the same people who tell you Google is impossible to master. Nonsense! It’s all terribly logical and not complicated. It’s formula driven, no tricks, no magic, it’s organic marketing at it’s best.
I hate to rain on the guru’s parade here but it doesn’t take 25 DVD’s, or 200 page PDF’s to learn this process either. That’s just too much hype and really bad editing. And trust me, it is a simple to follow process. But you have to follow it! Long tail keyword research, blogging, article marketing and videos are at the heart of the process. Then it’s a matter of which social media sites to use, which RSS feed directories to use, and a few other tweaks, and you are on page one of Google within a few days.
When you get the hang of social media, and land your site or blog on page one of Google, and start getting some calls and sales, you’ll know for absolutely proof positive, that you have become the media itself!

