Who cares if your brand is online?

Well, apparently many people. More staggering news regarding the state of the newsprint industry in the U.S.

Perhaps the movement towards more engaging media is being facilited by the dip in our economy or the fuzzy line between fact and fiction in some of the world's leading journalistic institutions. Or perhaps the reason lies in that eternal need for human's to connect and own the responsibility to respond to the community that surrounds them. There's a reason why there are more web pages than people on the planet. And there's a reason why there are millions of blogs reaching millions of people (even though some are wondering how many are too many?).

People want genuine relationships. They want to receive genuine information and to interact with genuine people. Media is shifting away from the impersonal one-way communication it used to be. People can boost a brand with a few key strokes. A consumer can speak to (or with) millions with 30 seconds of video. The proclamation that social media is a 'fad' should be reviewed. Perhaps the technology that we currently use is just the current trend, but the urge to connect one on one has been there long before Konrad Zuse and Ray Tomlinson.

This inherent need for consumers to connect and how this translates into brand messaging is a key interest of mine. It is important that we continue to differentiate driving force between the use of social technology and the fall of traditional media. It has far less to do with technology, and far more to do with how the medias have been used and the brands that use them.