I was just reading about Shaq’s endorsement announcement on Digg and it raised an interesting question. Are people finally connecting on the Internet to the point where more industries will start to see their demise? I believe we are and we are already starting to see it with the newspapers having so much trouble. In the Shaq article, he was referring to the potential demise of traditional media for endorsement announcements. This will certainly start to happen more as celebrities turn to services like Twitter to communicate with their fans.
Media companies need to seriously adapt because the Newspapers didn’t react fast enough and look what happened to them. These media companies need to understand the value they bring to the table and that isn’t announcing news but critically analyzing news. Within the Social Web, people prefer to get their news from their friends and the people they respect. These people get the news from somewhere though and that is where the media companies need to step up their game and stop quickly announcing news and instead standout from the crowd and write intelligent and critical articles about the news. We still need the media and reporters because they have the time to research the stories and look behind the headline. After traditional media, what industry is next to adapt or die?
