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Social media has been on the upswing for the last few years and with the massive amounts of money being poured into social applications one might think that it was poised to knock traditional media right off the map, especially if you listen to the major shakers inside the social media movement.

I would consider myself to be an early adopter of many of these popular social media applications. I have been blogging for well over 3 years at this point, I am active in Twitter and Pownce, and I am a member of what seems like countless numbers of social networks (be it Facebook, LinkedIn, AdGabber, The Society for Word of Mouth, and on and on ad nauseum). However, does my own experience (not to mention the voices of social media that shout it’s praises far and wide) lead me to believe that it will over take traditional media on the time scale that the “experts” (no disrespect is meant by the quotation marks) predict? Well, to be frank, no.

Traditional Media: Alive And Kicking

My educational background is in history and political science and if there is one thing that I learned from the study of those two disciplines, it is this; just because all of your friends agree on something, it doesn’t make it so. Traditional media, be it newspapers, television, radio, direct mail, etc… has a lot more life in it than most people seem to think. Why do I feel this way, three short but very poignant words, “Dewey defeats Truman.”

Now, far be it from me to imply that the rise of social media is not due a considerable amount of respect. It is, and it will, almost assuredly, someday become the dominant form of media for marketers and advertisers all over the world. The evidence for this is already out there, with more and more money being poured into online advertising every day. There is no doubt that these spaces will eventually take the majority of the advertising dollars. However, there is still much work to be done to make this a reality.

The most recent census numbers estimate that there is a computer in 76% of American households. Now while that number may seem like the death knell for traditional media, less is known about what the majority of those 76% of households is doing with their computers. They surely aren’t all blogging, using facebook or twittering their lives away (leave that to us, we’ve already cornered the market on that).

Twitter for instance (the latest social media addiction for many of us) boasts a community of well over one million people. Yet the person with the most followers (Democratic Presidential hopeful Barack Obama) has just over 20,000 followers. Social Media magnates Jason Calacanis (Mahalo) and Robert Scoble have less than that. So if there are a million users, why are these people duking it out to get to having 2% of them as followers?

Facebook (the fastest growing social network if you believe their Comscore numbers) has over 60 million users, yet their advertising platform created such a negative ripple that it had to be completely overhauled within two months of its initial release. IT’s kissing cousin MySpace (the largest social network with well over 100 million users) looks like a throwback to the days of the bulletin board service. Bad graphics, poor layouts and useless crap all shoved onto a page for the opportunity to have more “friends” than the next guy or girl (because everyone knows that Tila Tequila is really friends with over 500,000 people).

Social media has had an enormous impact on the potential for communication via the internet. It has made brands personal, reviews believable and created a marketplace that is truly open. But does that mean that traditional media as we know it is dying? Well, I’ll believe that the :30 second tv spot is dying when people stop coughing up over $3 million for commercials during the Super Bowl.

Greg Hollingsworth will be writing a weekly column for HTSAA. He is a marketer and blogger who also writes about politics on Devil’s In The Details.

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