I remember being totally enamored by the story of Mozart the first time I saw Amadeus. One of the things Mozart did was change the way the Austrians viewed operas. They thought they knew what an opera was and then they experienced Mozart’s operas. He built on the foundation of operas as they had been done but improved on it dramatically.

In many ways that’s how I see the new marketing opportunities with social media and social networking tools. They build on the foundation of old marketing for something better. The video below from Amadeus drives home the difference between the old and new. Be sure to listen for the quote, “It doesn’t really work, does it?” Seems like it fits the old marketing vs. new marketing analogy pretty well. Here’s the clip for the feed readers.

Yesterday I saw a term I haven’t come across in a while: Mass Media. Remember that term? Yeah, we don’t hear it much these days. The context for the term came from a professor friend who teaches at a college here in Nashville. She mentioned a class for freshmen this fall called “mass media and society” but I got hung up at the mass media part of the class title.

I asked the professor why that term is still being used and it sounds like it has something to do with the book selection or something like that. Maybe it’s a historical perspective of media and our society. I’m not actually clear on what it’s going to be but the term got me thinking…isn’t mass media dead?

Mass media was all about the big TV networks, major newspaper outlets, and terrestrial radio, but how massive does something have to be to be considered mass media these days? With the numbers declining in all three of those areas can we even still call them mass media? Is the term even relevant today? Mass media died as it related to television years ago around the time cable TV really took off.

One might say mass media is about the number of people you reach, meaning you reach “the masses” (which I assume we translate into millions of people) through the mediums. Yet, that doesn’t really work because there are blogs, podcasts, and even YouTube videos that reach millions of people and we wouldn’t classify them as mass media. They’re the opposite of mass media: user generated, freely accessed, open to everyone, micro media.

Mass media is just a term that used to mean something that we don’t even think about anymore. It’s like the 8-track tape. It had a good run for a while but simply has no use to us today. Perhaps mass media didn’t actually die but simply disappeared in the shadow of so many other things that we use today.

The bottom line is that we kind of know that mass media doesn’t really stick like it used to. It doesn’t have the teeth it did even ten years ago. The real question as a marketer then, is do you still act/plan/execute like the mass media is still massive? There’s a new “MASS” you should be thinking about if you’re not already.

Incidentally, the mass media and society class at the college will have a blog. How’s that for irony?