Content Marketing and Proprietary Audience Development are sides of the same coin. One provides content for consumption, and one provides the audience that consumes.
The Truth About Your Home Field Advantage
Ever wonder if home field advantage is really a thing? Well, so did some researchers at Harvard University (@Harvard) back in 2007. After examining over 5,000 English Premier League games, they determined that for every additional 10,000 fans in the stands, the advantage for the home team increased by 0.1 goals.9
Home field advantage is real in sports—and in business. Your store, restaurant, office, or whatever other physical space you own isn’t just meant to house your business; it must also work for it. Today, that means optimizing in-store signage to build your Proprietary Audiences. It means coaching your employees to inform customers of the myriad ways they can stay informed of upcoming sales, specials, or unique FAN opportunities. It means doing everything consistent with your brand to convert the feet on your floor to SUBSCRIBERS, FANS, and FOLLOWERS before they leave the store. That’s how to beat the competition.
So if you don’t know them already, go get to know the folks who build your website, develop your signage, manage your social media, and message your audiences. Each will play a critical role in ensuring that your Owned Media helps build your Proprietary Audiences—all while your Proprietary Audiences drive traffic to your Owned Media.
Earned Media
The last type of media to aid your Proprietary Audience Development efforts is Earned Media. But here’s a bit of a curveball: Earned Media isn’t really media at all. Whereas Paid Media is media you effectively rent and Owned Media consists of marketing assets you own, Earned Media is more a process whereby an audience member produces and distributes content beneficial to your brand. To better understand this, we need to go back to college.
How Earned Media Is Made
Back when I was a freshman at Miami University (@MiamiUniversity), I took a Communications 101 course taught by Professor Robert Vogel (@vogelrav)—a man with more energy for communications than any human being has a right to have. It was in his course that I was first introduced to the Shannon-Weaver Model of Communications (Figure 5.2).10
FIGURE 5.2 Shannon-Weaver Model
I can see more than a few of you out there with fleeting looks of recognition. But before you hurt yourself trying to recall specifics, let me jog your memory. Shannon-Weaver was first developed to explain the technical specifics of electronic communications to engineers, but over time, it evolved into one of the most popular theories to describe marketing communications as well.
In the Shannon-Weaver model, a sender transmits a message through a medium (i.e., a channel) to reach an audience. Noise (technical, environmental, or other interference) can negatively impact the message. And upon receipt, the audience can provide feedback to the sender regarding the message.
The Shannon-Weaver model contemplates a calm, linear process driven by a single sender, message, medium, and audience. Of course, this is a far cry from the world in which we live today. Our audiences have audiences of their own; and as AMPLIFIERS, they mold, shape, and add to our message as they pass it along via social media—a term we use so frequently that it’s worth unpacking what social media actually is.
The temptation, of course, is to deliver your Charlton Heston impersonation and yell, “Social media is peeeeeeeeeeeople!!!”b However, social media isn’t people; it is a catchall term for the channels people use to transmit their messages. These channels include the usual suspects of Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest, but they also include channels we tend to forget are social—email, phone, and word of mouth. We bundle all of these channels as social media because they facilitate two-way communications among real people.c
In his recent book, Paid Owned Earned: Maximizing Marketing Returns in a Socially Connected World, author Nick Burcher (@NickBurcher) does a great job updating the Shannon-Weaver Model for the social media age.11 Building on Burcher’s vision, Figure 5.3 shows my take on a Shannon-Weaver Model for the Hybrid Marketing Era.
FIGURE 5.3 Modified Shannon-Weaver Model
As you can see, each audience member—once a passive recipient of information or entertainment—now becomes a potential sender (AMPLIFIER) in their own right. The original sender only controls the initial message content, channel selection, and primary audience selection. Each point of amplification after that is our Earned Media; not media that we can buy or own, but rather a process by which audience members become AMPLIFIERS. Let’s take another look at the other names for our AMPLIFIERS from Chapter 3: