As the last year in the first decade of 21st century, 2009 was certainly a year of flux. We saw lots of changes in media. Many magazines were shuttered, and some newspapers became online only. The Internet, in the Web 2.0 format was king. Twitter flourished, as did Facebook. Blogs continued to pop up everywhere. All the mainstream newscasts routinely place more information, video, interviews online. The divide between haves and have-nots is certainly growing.
Some trends that I personally disliked:
- The rise of personal branding to the level of ridiculous self-promotion.
- The failure of old guard public relations/advertising practitioners to embrace new media
- The idea that new media/social networks are THE solution (they are not)
- Social media “experts” (having a Twitter account and a blog does not make anyone an expert)
- Endless self-promotion on multiple platforms of social media
- Linking every Tweet to Facebook and LinkedIn and everything in between
- Feeling the need to tweet everything, have hashtags for everything and “follow Friday”
- Rise in sexist images in advertising
- Decline in thoughtful public relations campaigns
- Decline in traditional media, especially print journalism
- Endless hype/hysteria about the supposed big story of the minute (Tiger Woods, Octomom, Balloon Boy, etc.)
But on the bright side
- Social media has presented great opportunities for small businesses
- The new PBS NewsHour
- Increased desire for measurement and return on investment
- Twitter, in spite of the above problems, has allowed for new relationships and allegiances, not to mention new parlance (tweetup, tweetsgiving, etc)
- Acceptance of blogs as legitimate journalistic outlets
- Citizen journalism and subsequent empowerment
What are your best/worst for the year?
About Deborah Brody
Deborah Brody writes and edits anything related to marketing communications. Most blog posts are written under the influence of caffeine.
Thanks for your interesting and insightful review on 2009. As a UK based Marketer, I was interested in your take on the benefits of Social Media, especially for those smaller businesses that don’t have the luxury of large marketing budgets.
As a UK based Marketing and Advertising agency, we have been using Social media to help small businesses fight the recession with varying degrees of success. Although treated with a degree of sceptisim, most of our clienst now have a proactive social media strategies that are really begiining to deliver ROI.
Quite what 2010 will bring is uncertain. We know we will be having an election here in the UK soon and I will sit back and wait to see how Social media will impact on the election as it did with Obama.