Using New Media to Promote Your Company
What is New Media?
The term "New Media" is used to describe those avenues that don't include the traditional media outlets such as television, radio, newspapers, etc. Most commonly, new media refers to Internet technologies like streaming video, etc. The term can also be used to describe the Internet itself, as well as any other information delivery system like video games and others.
The ramifications of new media for advertisers is that there are more options for delivering your business' message than at any time in human history. A good example of the effect of so called new media is Google's "Universal Search," dubbed "Google 2.0." Essentially, the Google Universal Search returns the most relevant results for a given key phrase, regardless of the type of file. Little known among searchers is that Google has provided separate search engines for several categories of documents. These include vehicles for searching blogs, books, catalogs, programming code, a directory, financial documents, maps, news, patents, products, scholarly documents, video and of course, websites.
With Google 2.0, the familiar Google search box now returns the most relevant results from all of these indexes and lists them in the order in which it views as the most relevant to the key phrase.
What this means for advertisers is two fold. First, now is a critical time to consider using video content to augment, not only the user experience for visitors on your site, but also its position in the search rankings. Secondly, this means that in theory the ten website positions on the top level search results may be reduced to only a few, with the possibility of these positions being occupied by other types of content.
Podcasts Gaining Popularity
On the forefront of the new media boom is the Podcast. Podcasts are essentially topic-relevant audio and video files formatted to be played on portable music players, like the iPod. Supplying this type of document can very valuable to site visitors and is gaining popularity by the minute. How such files will ultimately be indexed by the major search engines remains to be seen, but with Google leading the way, there can be no doubt that the diversity of content that new media provides will be a huge factor on the Internet in the not so distant future.
The determination to be made by website owners is whether new media will have an impact on their website's conversion rate and ultimately impact the company's bottom line.
New Media is More than a Promotional Tool
Although new media has earned its place in the promotion of businesses and products/services, the possibilities are endless. These technologies are used increasingly in business to train employees and keep them up to speed with company events. It is also leading a new wave of entertainment with video sites like YouTube and MetaCafe redefining broadcast media.