Earned media? What is it? Essentially It would be categorised as “Word of Mouth” through a digital platform such as Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, Etc. Now that we understand roughly what earned media is lets try and figure our what has made it king? The answer is less deceptive than appears at first glance, Forbes noted that earned media will get you five times better results in comparison to its nearer competitor. On this statistic alone it’s apparent that this word of mouth is an extremely powerful tool. It’s rivals, paid and owned media both have their respective advantages. One being exposure that is funded by the corporation such as a Google advert, the other would be branded media such as an affiliated Facebook page . Earned media can become extremely powerful through user content sites such as Reddit/Hackernews/etc. A company with little or no resources can publish their ideas or promote their products on for example Reddit in a relevant category and like minded people will be able to see comment, recommend and purchase the said item. There is a whole technique in developing leads through reddit, check out this link!
Any advise for companies? Well each kind of media must be used in conjunction with the others to be successful a bit of both paid and owned media will have to be utilised in order to generate earned media in most scenarios. To create a snowball effect, your campaign may need a little booster at the start.
I would be interested to hear opinions in the comments.
Sarah, Enda, Conor, John - Digital Marketing 