• by September 26, 2011

One proven way to increase effectiveness and lower your costs is earned media coupled with social optimization. With the social share button being one click away from spreading good content, the connection between "earned" and "paid" is undeniable. Intent is everything, if someone shares, tweets, comments, etc., it all hits the graph and spreads to friends. That's gold!

Where brands fall short is the follow through engagement, re-posting the best-trending content means not just your super fans become your evangelists.

Without good content the engagement that drives reach will not happen and social has become the best way to integrate "paid," "earned" and "owned" media (PEOM) like never before.

Examples from a social perspective:

Paid: Buying Facebook ads, Twitter promoted ads and display ads / TV spots

Earned: Blog or news about your product, conversation on your social sites

Owned: A brand's own social media presence on Facebook, Twitter and websites, all used to drive interaction

The fact that consumers are connected and the social graph is melding paid, earned and owned media presents challenges in synthesizing and optimizing these three channels. Since social has truly leveled the playing field it takes work and here is where the "Earned" comes in. The majority of content is not being leveraged to its maximum due to poor tracking and the inability to be responsive. Creating more engagement on what's most relevant not only expands the brand's reach but also maximizes those paid assets.

Earned media's biggest payoff is from behavioral shared connections compelled to create reviews, a blog post, a comment or a tweet, people sharing their thoughts on your brand with their social network. Understanding intent and behavior around all that content gives brands a competitive advantage. All content being shared is reduced to a link and with one click hitting one of the major social networks. Word-of-mouth marketing now spreads at the speed of a button click and that's why earned media has become so important to a marketing campaign.

Social is a horizontal layer touching every part of your business, from customer service to customer acquisition, to customer retention. There are different performance metrics for each point along the marketing funnel. Now more pressure is on paid and owned media teams to streamline their coordination or lose the opportunity of momentum. As the barriers are being torn down and silos altered, a new form of media collaboration is being created.

Chase McMichael, Co-Founder and CEO, InfiniGraph