ADVOCATES
ANALYSTS
COMMENTERS
CREATORS
INFLUENCERS
REPORTERS
REVIEWERS
SHARERS
Each of these AMPLIFIERS creates Earned Media for you. CREATORS blog, podcast, and make videos. INFLUENCERS post, tweet, and pontificate. REPORTERS write news stories about your company, and SHARERS take your message to the far corners of their personal networks. Earned Media is the output of AMPLIFIER actions; not an audience unto itself. To put it another way:
Just because you use generate Earned Media does not mean you’ve built lasting Proprietary Audiences for your company.
The AMPLIFIERS who generate your Earned Media are the most fleeting members of your proprietary audiences. They can like, share, or tweet—and then leave without a trace. That may not limit the impact of your Earned Media in the moment, but it requires you to pay for or build audiences from scratch the next time you need one.
For this reason, just as with Paid and Owned Media, it is imperative that you encourage AMPLIFIERS to also become SUBSCRIBERS, FANS, and FOLLOWERS. This allows you to message them directly whenever you want—and potentially set the dominoes of Earned Media in motion. If you fail to convert some of your momentary AMPLIFIER audience members into SUBSCRIBERS, FANS, and/or FOLLOWERS, you’re leaving money on the table.
Converged Media
As you’ve undoubtedly determined by now, the lines between Paid, Owned, and Earned Media are blurring every day. Perhaps no one has documented this better than Rebecca Lieb (@lieblink) and Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) from Altimeter Group (@AltimeterGroup). Their research report, The Converged Media Imperative: How Brands Must Combine Paid, Owned, and Earned Media, is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the changing media landscape.12 In it, they visualize marketing’s Paid, Owned, and Earned Media landscape as shown in Figure 5.4.
FIGURE 5.4 The Convergence of Paid, Owned, and Earned Media
Source: The Converged Media Imperative: How Brands Must Combine Paid, Owned, and Earned Media,” Altimeter Group (July 19, 2012). Used with permission.
In describing this model, they explain that:
As consumers become increasing mobile, paid/owned/earned convergence will intensify. Rapid journeys across multiple digital devices will increasingly blur the lines until almost all distinction between paid, owned, and earned media dissolve.13
Converged Media refers to those marketing efforts where a company uses two or more forms of media plus a consistent creative execution across multiple channels to achieve their desired results. As Rebecca and Jeremiah observe, media companies themselves are a driving force behind the rise of Converged Media. They offer products and services that merge the best of Paid Media with the control of Owned Media and the amplification of Earned Media. Examples include:
Facebook Sponsored Stories, which allow advertisers to pay to promote consumer posts in ways that increase visibility, reach, engagement, and FAN audience size (via likes).14
Facebook Custom Audiences, which allow advertisers to map email SUBSCRIBER addresses or CUSTOMER phone numbers to their existing Facebook FANS in order to facilitate highly targeted advertising within the Facebook platform.15
Twitter Promoted Accounts, Promoted Trends, and Promoted Tweets, which allow brands to pay to increase their FOLLOWER count, increase visibility around relevant trending topics, and amplify the best stories about their products and services.16
A clear byproduct of Converged Media is proprietary audience growth. Our mission is to make sure it’s not just an afterthought but rather a primary objective. If you aren’t using your Paid, Owned, and Earned Media to increase the size, engagement, and value of your Proprietary Audiences, then your marketing isn’t standing nearly as tall as it could.
a The Ouroboros represents cycles that continue without end. It is depicted the world around as a serpent eating its own tail.
b An homage to Heston’s famous line in the movie Soylent Green, when he discovers (spoiler alert!) that the dystopian food rations being served are actually made of human beings (“Soylent green is people!”).
c We marketers (present company included) constantly refer to people as consumers. It does us well to step back now and then and think of our mom, dad, friend, spouse, or someone else very real. That helps us focus on their needs instead of solely ours—a perspective that proves highly valuable in social media.
1. Cathryn Humprhies and Matthew Weiner, “Season 3, Episode 2: Love Among the Ruins,” Mad Men, November 2009, www.slantmagazine.com/house/2009/08/mad-men-mondays-on-tuesday-season-3-episode-2-love-among-the-ruins/.
2. “The New Multi-screen World: Understanding Cross-Platform Consumer Behavior,” Google Think Insights, August 2012, www.google.com/think/research-studies/the-new-multi-screen-world-study.