According to eMarketer last week the UK became the first of the big economies to see online advertising spending surpass TV spending. This is quite a turning point for the internet. There is growing recognition of the place it playing in peoples daily lives.

Personally I wonder if the change has something to do with addition of tools like i-player – a play again facility which the BBC have provided for free on the internet. Such asynchronous tools have seen more and more viewers starting to watch TV on their computers. As this happens then the distinctions between TV and the internet certainly start to blur.

However what should be really interesting for advertisers who are moving across to the internet is understanding what a different medium they are dealing with. On the internet you can do so much more with your marketing. The ability to reach out to users is unprecedented. The push model of TV advertising simply no longer fits.

The best way to thinking of promotion on the internet should be as a conversation with your clients. Spend on such Social Media marketing is still small however the potential is vast. It is also relatively cheap – if companies were to spend one tenth of the budget that they used to spend on a TV advert on social media they might be surprised at the return!

The other fascinating side to using the internet as a medium is the ability to monitor the campaign. The internet provides so much data (sometimes too much) it is really simple to test out ideas, monitor the results and then modify. This iterative approach to marketing would have been timely in more traditional advertising. I think it is here that Social Media will win out in the end because the data clearly shows what works and what doesn’t. Once companies have taken the plunge they rarely look back.

Here are SociaLNK we love to help companies take the plunge into Social Media. We can develop clear social media strategies for your company, that focus around your customers and their particular needs.

SociaLNK is based in Oxford, a centre for intellectual debate. We often have the opportunity to be involved in some great talks and discussions. Last month the Oxford Social Media Convention was focused around the impact of social media on the more traditional forms of media. A key talk was that by Richard Sambrook who is director of the BBC Global News Division.

Just as in many other spheres of life he argued that social media is transforming the role of journalism. The media is no longer acting as gatekeeper rather they are involved in sharing the news in a public space. He thinks that the impact of social media is a little over-hyped at the moment but does believe it will make lasting changes to the news.

One of things that he can see evolving is a new objectivity. Although journalism has always been based on trust, in this new media world it is “transparency that delivers trust”. In other words the emergence of news is now seen as almost as important as delivering the news itself. In a sense he is arguing that viewers are becoming much more sophisticated in their news consumption and so the relationship between the news presenters and the public becomes more equal. They no longer need to hide behind a veneer of perfectly presented news stories.

Despite this he does not see the role of the citizen journalist replacing the need for journalism. Journalism is much more than just information. It requires discipline, analysis, research, explanation and context.

Another speaker John Kelly of the Washington Post discussed how the advent of social media was affecting the newspaper industry. He argued that the print media were starting to use social media tools, such as discussion forums, to their advantage to increase the engagement of their readers. Apparently 8% of the Daily Telegraph web traffic now comes from social media.

He brought up the subject of crowdsourcing as a possible source of value for journalism in the future. This is a fascinating topic. Crowdsourcing is a term coined by Jeff Howe in an article (2006) in Wired magazine. He argued that one could apply the open-source principles beyond software. Instead of outsourcing a task to one person you outsource it to a crowd and bring the distributed intelligence of many people to bear.

Of course the famous example of using crowdsourcig in print media was during the MP Expense scandal when the Guardian created a simple site that allowed members of the public to help analyse the 700,000 expense claim documents. Over 20,0000 people participated in finding erroneous data. This incredible free resource enabled the guardian to rapidly carry out much more detailed analysis than they could have afforded any other way.

It seems that the connectedness and transparency that the internet affords is having impacts on every type of organisation. Experimentation seems to be the name of the game at the moment. It is going to be fascinating ride!