“The two most powerful words you can use in a headline are FREE and NEW. You can seldom use FREE, but you can always use NEW.”

So says ad man David Ogilvy in his 1963 tell-all Confessions of an Advertising Man. Still considered the de facto guide on modern advertising, Confessions lays out in fine print the strategies the door-to-door salesman turned “Father of Advertising” used to create Ogilvy & Mather, one of the most successful ad agencies in the world.

The book was inspired by Ogilvy’s belief that his industry faced systemic problems in 1963: Manufacturers spent more money on price-off deals than solid advertising while agencies were more interested in awards than products. The solution, Ogilvy contended, relied on research, discipline, creativity with an emphasis on the “Big Idea,” and most importantly, results. “In the modern world of business,” he wrote, “it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.”

Is social media really different? Or just another dialect in the business vernacular?