Social Media

Years ago, the realization finally hit that you can’t just place an Advertisement on CBS, NBC, or ABC and hit your target audience.  They called it ‘fragmentation’ when all the Cable networks started up and began to dilute the audience any one of the 3 had.

It was no longer easy to hit 1/3 or the market with a single network.  Now you had to figure out if your audience was actually tuning into ABC for comedy, and that they are now spending more time on Comedy Central.  And then you decided how to allocate budget across the various channels.

So fast forward 20 years and consider the fragmentation on the internet.  The early ‘networks’ of AOL, and Yahoo have become just another possible channel your target may want to watch.

But on the web, your customer has thousands of more ‘channels’ to watch and this time the channels are interactive – the user can talk back and not only that, talk to each other.  Web 2.0 is the name often given to the personalization and interaction being built into the  sites and digital assets of many companies.

Your challenge now is to find the multiple places where your target audience hangs out.  Many of these Social Media outlets can be used by brands in new and creative ways – but it takes a plan.