Heads Up To Earned Social Media

Oct. 19, 2011 - PRLog -- Increasing numbers of site owners have been warming to the idea of social media. Not necessarily because they can see any direct connection to beefing up monthly sales. Or they feel the need to be seen to be posting on Facebook, blogging and tweeting. It’s more likely that they think earned media means free media, as opposed to paid media – and so it’s a case of, “Heads up - let’s give it a go for a few months, it’s not costing us anything!”

‘Cept, of course, it does! The confusion over “paid”, “earned”, and “owned” social media really follows on from a mindset that essentially views online as an almost “free to air” alternative to offline, physical print advertising. Aside, of course from creating PPC ads and bidding for SEO keywords to get to Google No.1. Traditional online marketing – understood as paid media, aimed at driving sales traffic to site conversion.

However, in the age of multichannel search and social, the constant development of a website design hub, and the crucial importance of providing quality content for optimising customer experience on all relevant channels and platforms, is defined as owned media.

It’s a recognition that web pages are newly defined as essential resource platforms of quality content self-publishing. Irrespective of products or services, eCommerce sites must do more than sell. They must engage and inform, entertain and enlighten to gain credibility with sophisticated online audiences and sentient semantic algorithms.

That leads finally to the concept of earned media. It’s not free. It comes into existence as a result of a process of correctly and diligently integrating the awareness marketing strategies of paid and owned media with a policy of sustained social media content networking. Search and social link building!

The cost is measured in knowing how, where, when and who to engage to create the word of mouth advocates of your social web presence. The real meaning of earned media is not a free one–size-fits-all mass mail out, auto tweet or a sales pitch blog! It comes as a result of time, patience, trial and error taken to listening, discovering and learning how to be social, online.

Creating connection and engagement is not going to endure by pasting wall to wall coupons and discount offers on a Facebook page, or auto-tweeting sales messages on the hour, every hour, every day. Remember – human contact has to be “earned”. Trust, credibility and authority - all have to be “earned”.

That’s why it’s not free -  it’s earned media.

Simples!


Visit http://www.weprovoke.co.uk for more information and advice.

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