The more people join Facebook or some other social networking site, the more viewers watch TV on a DVR or through Netflix, the more consumers use the Internet to research product purchases to verify advertising claims, the more the traditional marketing community wonders what to do. Interruption marketing to a captive TV audience is dead.

What was once a national audience has passed into an infinitely fragmented set of demographics. And the once passive consumer is now active. It makes for a changed marketing landscape.

At the same time, many social media “experts” (pretty much anyone with a blog) are telling marketers that nothing they know holds true anymore. Are they right?

No.

It’s true that technology has changed the way people receive messages and content, but what they value in those messages and content is unchanged. Marketing Profs’ Ann Handley in a recent “Content and Conversations” webinar said that internet/social media content needs to be “relevant and useful information that your visitors will find helpful, educational, interesting, or (sometimes) just plain fun.” Yet the change there is really about the medium—how the content is delivered. The definition of good content is the same as it’s always been.

What marketers need to do is adapt their content to the new media, social and otherwise. Remember, it wasn’t too long ago (on a geologic scale) that marketers had to adapt their promotional message to the new medium of television. And that worked out all right. Consider this story about how Bruce Helford, the executive producer of “The Drew Carey Show” adapted his retail experience to promote his product (in this case, a sitcom).

Helford recalled that when retail competitors came on the market, their store often had special promotions or
sales to limit traffic to the competitor’s business. Helford just applied this principle to television. That doesn’t mean he had a two-for-one sale when networks premiered competing shows opposite “Drew Carey.”  And he certainly wasn’t the one who coined the phrase “very special episode.” But he did do something special.

“The Drew Carey Show” was well known for its occasional live episodes which were not just taped before a live studio audience, they were broadcast in real time, and they were very much of an occasion. Anything could go wrong, and sometimes did, which is why the audience tuned in in larger than normal numbers. This type of sitcom “promotion” limited the ratings of competing programs and helped keep “The Drew Carey Show” on the air for nine seasons. It wasn’t about changing content, it was about using the medium differently and making it new again.

Can you adapt mass media marketing strategies to the new social media? Yes. Consider Emerge Digital’s online cause marketing campaigns, our social media applications, our branded games and contests. All of these promotions have their roots in traditional marketing, we just reinvented them, online. Messages and content still need to be relevant and useful, maybe even fun for your target audience. The big challenge is how to deliver your message using the new media. It’s something we have a little experience doing.

Maybe we can help you.