Brian’s blog comparing Traditional Media and Social Media got me thinking about how social media is shaping not only marketing, but our culture as a whole. Here are five words that social media is removing from the marketing vernacular.

1. Audience

Social media creates the opportunity for two-way communication between the brand and the user. Customers are no longer an audience passively waiting to be handed a message. They are no longer asked to simply listen. They are encouraged to participate in real time.

New Term: Friend

2. Ratings

For the last 60 years, ratings were the only way of trying to plan a media strategy. The biggest flaw in ratings is that they only allow someone to speculate what amount of people should be consuming the media at any given time. Add to the equation that ratings only come out two times a year and you begin to see how much guesswork has been in marketing over the last half century.

Social media gives weekly, if not up-to-the minute, information on what’s being consumed and what people are interested in. Furthermore, you don’t simply know if they saw the message but you know how that message impacted them. Did they post a comment? Did they follow the link? The list goes on.

New Term: Analytics

3. Campaign

It’s probably safe to say that most marketers, especially creatives, got into the biz to work on campaigns. It’s a true joy to take a good idea and spread it over every media. What’s better is to wake up after six months to a year and know you get to come up with something new.

Social media doesn’t have an end date. It requires an intimate understanding of the brand’s identity and the ability to personify and project that identity in real time. Successful social media executions treat the user-brand experience like a conversation that ebbs and flows naturally.

New Term: Profile

4. Slogan

As a copywriter, it pains me to see the day of the slogan disappear. In essence, the slogan takes the brand, the message and the call to action and compresses it into five words or less. It is the ultimate challenge and greatest reward.

Social media removes the need for a slogan. Without having a time limit, there is no need for a five-word summation of your brand. Sure there are character limits, but links always allow the conversation to continue. And since social media is a conversation, a slogan is weird. It’d be like me introducing myself by saying, “Hi I’m Jason, all the charm without the hair. How are you?”

New Term: TBD

5. Spot

Numbered are the days of :15, :30 and :60 spots. The script edits, hastly read copy and illegibly small disclaimers are slowly going the way of the Dodo.

Social media doesn’t have a time limit. Links let people go as deep as they want into the message. Video can be as long or as short as it needs to be to get the message across. Obviously, long videos or posts will turn-off users, but the message can be delivered naturally. Perhaps one day, you won’t even know you’re watching an advertisement because you’ll no longer be programmed to view anything :30 or :60 seconds as an ad. Maybe you’ll enjoy infotainment more.

New Term: Post

Social media is still in its infancy and won’t replace traditional media anytime soon. However, it will continue to shape the way we interpret and discuss marketing as a whole.