What's in a name?

This is reposted from my work blog, Luminary.

Call it "social media". Go to a "Web 2.0" conference. Look to the masses for crowdsourcing. Think of it as PR 2.0. Or The Long Tail. Or...

Whew. As communicators, we often get caught up in the names and labels we assign to new fields and we forget the actual importance of the technology.

Regardless of what you want to call it, "New Media" is here to stay and must be an essential component of the marketing mix. I think that the most identifiable characteristic is bringing the community to the content. The truly special thing about New Media is its transience. For the first time in modern civilization, content producers are hardly separated from content consumers. This enables each of us to receive the type of information that we need and to ignore all of the content we don't.

And marketers are paying attention to it too. According to this recent study by the University of Massachusetts, 39 percent of the INC 500 are blogging.

Before social media was vogue, if you weren't paying attention to your customers, your business probably failed.

Now, if your business doesn't get social feedback from its customers, it can never succeed.