stevealu: Why Is Earned Media Important to Your Business

বুধবার, ১৩ মার্চ, ২০১৩

Why Is Earned Media Important to Your Business | Mr. Social PR

Being a resource to media professional ? those editors, reporters, and television radio producers ? can be a boon to your business. It doesn?t matter whether you sell a product or provide a service, earned media will generate more authority. I fact, audience studies show earned media is seven times more credible for your brand than advertising.

What Is Earned Media

When a public relations practitioner persuades a reporter, editor, or producer to used you as a source in a story, that?s a media mention, which is one form of earned media. Publishing bylined articles in outlets, such as, newspapers, magazines or in blogs, that?s another form of earned media.

It?s earned because someone, usually a trained PR practitioner, pitched a media professional a story idea, or you as an in-the-know resource. It?s earned because the practitioner worked for it.

Historically Why Is Earned Media Important

Looking at earned media, there are two factors your should know. How is the media spreading your message? In other words, to what extent has your message penetrated media outlets of your target audience? This is called the share of coverage. ?And, share of discussion, which is different, but equally important. It takes into account the extent of media coverage and factors in the quality of the messages the media spreads.

If your company?s shares are high and the coverage is positive, you stand a very good chance of earning tremendous creditability without spending a dime on flashy advertising.

Here?s an example before earned media became the new online marketing buzzword:

A business-to-business software company that relied 100 percent on share of discussion earned media discovered its sales teams closed more contracts when the company?s ?positive competitive media coverage increased.?

Another example shows how negative media coverage can drive product sales:

In early 2006 the American College of Chest Physicians release a report damning the effectiveness of over-the-counter cough syrups. The study said, ?There is no clinical evidence that over-the-counter cough expectorants or suppressants relieve cough.?? According to Jeffrey, et al, ?The articles went on to?say that allergy medications were effective, however, due to their drying effects.??Sales for cough syrup plunged, and allergy medicines skyrocketed in the days after the report to the media.

Here?s one example:

Starz Entertainment Group launched a media relations campaign around the launch of VONGO in 2006. According to media relations expert, David Henderson, consumers could download ?from a large library of motion pictures and other video content ? including first-run feature films ? for playback? on PC devices.?The media blitz ?generated nearly 300 million news media impressions in a 10-day period,? Henderson writes in his book Making News, ?The campaign also drove web traffic and consumer subscriptions.

In each of these cases, we can see how savvy media relations paid big dividends. In the first example, sales teams closed more deals. The second example shows how authoritative reports drives consumer behavior. Folks threw out Robutissin in favor of Benedryl. Finally, in addition to earning 300 million media impressions, Starz media relations drove web traffic and subscriptions.

There is no question ? authority drives behavior.?

Why Has Earned Media Turned Atomic

Plenty of credible search engine optimization professionals have explained how Google?s Penguin updates have given rise to and empowered earned media more than ever before. Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz published, ?The Death of Link Building and the Re-Birth of Link Earning,? which describes the update well.

Here?s how this earned media is going atomic. More newspapers and magazines are scrapping their paper-and-ink productions in favor of publishing online. Studies from Pew, last year?s State of the News Media Report?and this report about digital media from the Annual Report on American Journalism?document the tsunami of media organizations moving to the Internet and people consuming their news online. Mashable reported on the migration of attention to online resources two years ago in its article, ?For the First Time, More Get News Online Than From Newspapers.?

Now a link in a New York Times article can drive people to a piece of information that deepens their understanding on a company website. When consumers understand something better they ascribe to that purveyor of knowledge authority, because that information helped them make better decisions. And that translates into brand loyalty. And that?s why earned media is going atomic.

Says Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land, ?What you want is to be linked from places where there?s an actual audience that might see your link and click on it directly to visit.?Do that, and you?re building the type of links the search engines want to reward.??A few other benefits of earned media include:

Good online PR increases your search results.
Stories give your network something to talk about.
Good online publicity helps yield good publicity everywhere else.

If the exodus reports of people migrating from print-and-ink to online for their news are true, (there?s no reason to think otherwise), then this is the dawn of a media relations conquest of online marketing. This is also the point where business owners should take note.

Digital is here to stay and we will see more media outlets migrate online. As we do, earned media will only increase in value. Authority will only become more authoritative. And brands that start now will dominate the share of conversation and reap its rewards very soon. The plans of the diligent lead surely to abundance, the proverb says. Will diligence by your friend or foe?

In my next piece, I will explain which kinds of articles and stories you should be pitching for placement to reap the coming harvest.