Pete Spande at Continuous Beta says:
Media hasn’t become social. It always was. I talked about the latest Dukes of Hazzard episode with anyone who would listen in 1980. My mother sent me newspaper clippings all the through my college career (for example – don’t use Bean0, it is made with penicillin! [I’m alergic.]) The difference now is that media is social with SCALE.
The other big difference, Pete, is that social media — word of mouth, to use the old term — is now measurable. I used to get a lot of gaff at ClickZ for writing about word-of-mouth marketing, because, uh… what’s digital or interactive about that?
My argument was always that the advent of digital media, and user-generated media, meant that you can now see and measure what people are saying about your brand. You can analyze positive versus negative; you can take that feedback and improve your products. And you can participate in the conversation and affect what people are saying about you. Pretty damned cool.