Traditional ads will not go away any time soon, but the Web is a smarter way to advertise. Social media, for example, is a way to engage people with ongoing dialogue instead of temporary engagement. This creates loyalty.

Despite consistent readership, magazines are closing left and right because advertisers are redistributing focus. More money is being spent on online programs to generate ROI. There is no way to track why someone decides to buy something based on a commercial. This is possible with the Web – they either click or do not click.

Marketers use social media as an extension of customer service to embrace both the pos. and negative comments. This reduces labor costs and prevents consumers from getting an automated voice for troubleshooting.

While click rates are lower on social media sites, one thing that makes social media ads successful is that they allow for greater reinforcement because visitors are likely to visit the site multiple times each day.

Stowe Boyd offers the following input:

This social revolution is subversive and will be fought by the mass culture machine. Bloggers were wild-eyed fringe lunatics, but now we are being joined at the edge by the best and brightest journalists, who are learning a new freedom at the edge. Our social tools have created a brand new place for people to congregate, play, and work, and those that at first suggested that all this was a fad, a mania, or some sort of plot have started to try to embrace it, if only to try to turn it to industrial use. But the endless efforts to suggest that web services like Twitter are failures because personal productivity does not increase through their use are laughable: we know we are trading industrial productivity for networked connectedness. We are basing our ethics on being connected and shared meaning, not industrial performance. We are embracing the ancient truths of deep play, and creativity, and love, and dropping the mass culture masks that were manufactured for us, along with the industrial dreams.