The buzz surrounding “new media” has led to a number of consultants and candidates vying for the perfect blend of traditional methods and 21st century skills in order to win their races. Are you on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn? How many other social media sites do you regularly rely on when distributing your message? And what the heck is “new media” anyway?

Simply put, it is any type of mechanism for distributing information in a “new” way. By new, it’s a good guess that most of this stuff wasn’t around five years ago, and if it was, it was more a tool of a technophobe than a traditionalist. Today, we have streaming media, vertical marketing, email campaigns, viral messaging, and a whole new suite of tools that allow for message distribution across multiple mediums.

An example: one of the best kept secrets to spreading your message is YouTube. Did you know that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, falling behind only Google in the number of requests made on a daily basis? Oh, and guess who owns YouTube – that’s right, Google. It offers free hosting, videos can be displayed in either high or low quality depending on the end-user’s connection, and keywords can be distributed to ensure that the right people are making it to your “channel”.

Think about that – a living, breathing, 24 hour a day infomercial with no shelf life that companies and candidates can advertise on for free. Now add a link to your YouTube channel on your website, send an update via Twitter about your new channel (which will automatically populate on your Facebook page as well), drag a camera to your next event and upload that footage, and…

Well, you get the picture.

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