From Nielsen’s post:
“The first explanation is essentially that the people in charge of the failing industries are stupid. How else could it be, the argument goes, that those enormous companies, with all that money and expertise, failed to see that services like iTunes and Last.fm are the wave of the future? …The second common explanation for the failure of an entire industry is that the people in charge are malevolent. In that explanation, evil record company and newspaper executives have been screwing over their customers for years, simply to preserve a status quo that they personally find comfortable.”

Ilyin goes on to argue that while “it’s true that stupidity and malevolence do sometimes play a role in the disruption of industries… even smart and good organizations can fail in the face of disruptive change.”

This is the part that jumps out to us in marketing and advertising today.Social media is potentially the most disruptive change to our industry since  email. Watching so many companies and agencies (ourselves included) pushing to adopt the brightest and shiniest new technologies, we have to ask if the social media craze will fundamentally change the way people advertise. Our answer is yes. And no.

Yes it will change the media we use, or at least add to them. At times, it will also change the message. We will have to adapt to use these new media in completely different ways than we’ve used any medium before. But the end goal remains the same. Building relationships. And while social media does threaten the ways we’ve traditionally tried to build those relationships, it replaces them with ways that are potentially much more powerful and more effective than anything we’ve ever seen.

For the past few months, IF marketing & advertising has been running our own social media experiment. We’re diligently tracking our results and logging our time, so watch this space for a detailed Social Media Marketing report soon. Until then, check us out on your favorite networking sites.