While the drop in advertising isn’t new for newspapers, it hasn’t always been their No. 1 problem. Credit for that goes to the systemic and ongoing declines in circulation. Newspapers are simply less relevant across society than they once were.

But the dynamic behind shrinking advertising is different; it’s more like the experience of magazines – especially business-to-business – over the past decade.

I’ve written about the reasons behind the loss of advertising for magazines, and I’m not alone. The issue isn’t that advertising has ceased to work; I don’t believe that’s the case now, nor do I foresee the day when it is.

The issue is that other things now work better. And by other things, I really mean one other thing: social media.

First, more people are involved in social media than in any other media channel. If you lump together YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Slideshare and the thousands of other social media websites, day-to-day participation is as broad as any other media channel.

Further, in most cases participation is free – even for the marketers, at the most basic level.

Further still, results are always measurable.

The equation is really simple: Marketers who are pulling back on their traditional advertising are merely following the lead of other marketers. And those who are not actively involved in social media are negligent. Marketers need to be where the people are, so they simply aren’t going to ignore a media channel that has so quickly attracted a large percentage of the world’s population.

I could predict that advertising revenues are going to continue their decline for newspapers, because consumer advertisers are now discovering what business-to-business advertisers learned several years ago: With social media, you can  (and should) become your own publisher – developing an audience and serving it with meaningful, interesting and helpful content.

That doesn’t mean newspapers, magazines or any other type of print media are doomed. But newspapers of the future will be very different than they were just six years ago. The sooner they figure out how to unhitch their fortunes from advertising, the better off they’ll be.

People start their own business in order to do what they love and do well. Marketing becomes a necessary evil.

For many, writing is a chore. Or databases are a mystery. Or blogging takes too much time. Social media creates an uncomfortable blend between business and personal. Networking is superficial. Advertising is too expensive and doesn’t work quickly. Public relations is a crapshoot.

It’s altogether too time-consuming, too hard, too expensive. There’s so much marketing work to do that  nothing gets done. And it’s easy to justify, because word-of-mouth is the thing that works the best anyway. But word-of-mouth isn’t real marketing; it’s luck. And while I’d rather be lucky the good, the real winners are both.

Aside from being under-capitalized, marketing paralysis may be the most common affliction among small businesses. There is a lot to know about marketing and too many easy reasons not to get started.

But marketing is now more accessible to small businesses than it’s ever been. Marketing rarely comes for free, but it’s possible to start marketing seriously without risking thousands of dollars like you had to do 10 years ago.

So here’s an idea: Try one thing. Instead of getting overwhelmed by all there is to learn about marketing, try choosing one marketing activity and focusing on it until you’re proficient – or at least comfortable.

What should you do first? I’d advise doing the activity that interests you most; you’re more likely to find the joy in mastering it.

But if you insist on being pointed in the right direction, swallow your pride and jump onto Facebook. Why? It’s a tool that can allow you to reach 1 out of 2 people in the United States – for free. If you coughed up $3 million to advertise on the Superbowl you wouldn’t reach that many people. Facebook is, simply, the largest media outlet in the world. And you can get started without spending a nickel.

What do you do on Facebook? Start by building a profile for your company, and then explore and experiment. We can discuss it in more detail another time. What’s important is that you do something. Anything.

Ignore that; that’s just headline-writing 101 – making the message immediately relevant. 2010 will inevitably bring more bad news for old-line media. But it will still be very much alive by the end of 2010.

But Broitman makes a great point, and I think he’s dead on.

His point is that online media will continue to supplant what he calls offline media (and what I, anachronistically perhaps, refer to as traditional media) at ever-increasing speed.

He gives two examples why (he claims there are three, but only two clearly jumped out at me from the column):

1. The skill and frequency with which offline media are using the web and social media – moving from passive entertainment/information to true interaction.
2. Applications being developed that shift the notion of information and search from keywords you type into a box on the web to something more contextual: information that comes to you because you ask a question out loud, or because you point a camera phone at an object.

There’s another irony; while media is becoming more active, search is becoming more passive. When selling print advertising, I made the point that consumers use print and online differently. Print was for grazing – looking for things you didn’t know to think about; online was for finding information you knew you wanted. Those purposes are merging. If Marshall McLuhan were still around, he’d have to rewrite Understanding the Media as TV becomes “hot” and Google becomes “cool.”

Too often, media allow themselves to be steered by past experience – their own and that of consumers.

For instance, all sorts of new studies proclaim to know whether people will pay for online content. How do they know? They ask.

But they ask things like: “Would you pay for this newspaper online.” The answer to that isn’t helpful; a newspaper isn’t built for online consumption – and the prospect of reading it online is unappealing. So people will say no.

People who answer such surveys haven’t generally put thought into what they would pay for online. They’ll just know it when they see it. Which means that it’s the job of the media to figure out its own future; the audience isn’t going to be much help.

So the real point that I take from Broitman’s column is one that’s essentially unspoken: offline media will continue to decline because of the relentless growth in online offerings that will be worthy buying.

The unresolved question is how many of these offerings will be created by startups vs. the existing “offline” media.

But it’s a stupid game.

It has nothing to do with how much you have to say or how often you say it. It has everything to do with how many people you follow. I recently attended a webcast on how to build a social network on Twitter. The basic advice: follow a lot of people and they’ll follow you back. And if they don’t follow you back, unfollow them.

The rest of the session was inside ball: what rules Twitter uses to prevent such inanity and how to get around them (wait 24 hours before unfollowing anyone); how to identify non-followers quickly using Twitter’s minimalist interface (if you don’t have a direct-message option next to their name, they aren’t following you); and which tools you can use (Hummingbird, $197.00) to automatically follow people and then unfollow them if they fail to reciprocate.

By using this advice (not the software; just the advice) I  tripled the number of people following me (from about 100 people after 4 months of thoughtful tweeting to 300 people after another day and just one tweet). Time spent in the effort: 15 minutes.

The etiquette at Twitter is simple: Someone follows you, you follow them back. And vice versa.

How this does anyone any good is beyond me; it assures that you have an audience of people who don’t give a wit about anything you have to say. And vice versa.

To prove the point, I just got a follow from someone whose list of followers and followees at this moment is in the range of 34,000. She has 14 tweets since May (4 months).

Fourteen? Really? That’s 1,960 characters, which isn’t even a respectable dependent clause to William Faulkner. That’s like 17 followers per word. If Jesus had a ratio like that, would Islam even exist?

When in history have so many people lined up to listen to so many people with so little to say?