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EARNED INTERACTIVE MEDIA: LET’S LISTEN
Earned media are mentions or stories about a brand, through either publicity, social
media, personal contact, or word of mouth. The term has been used in public relations
to distinguish between paid advertising messages and unpaid brand mentions in the
news media. In recent years the word “earned” has also been used to describe the way
social media and word of mouth convey comments about brands.
The various media in the earned category carry conversations, complaints and
criticisms, praise, and questions—all of which can and should be monitored by brand
stewards. Most importantly, they all impact the brand reputation, which is
determined by what others say about the brand. That’s a critical concept in IMC, and
media strategies are particularly important in determining the strength of the brand’s
reputation as well as a positive impression.
Earned Publicity
Publicity is an important type of earned media. In publicity, media-relations
specialists seek to persuade media editors to carry stories about an organization or
brand. These experts have no control over the media but can only hope that their
stories are newsworthy and interesting enough to receive coverage. The result is a hit
when a story or significant parts of it appear in the media.
Reporters may mention a company or brand in a story they are researching and
writing. Since mentions can be either positive or negative, public relations specialists
who monitor media coverage can only hope the mentions are positive. If they are
negative, they may (should) prompt a strategic response by the organization.
Because hits and mentions are not determined by the brand, they are seen as having
higher levels of credibility than advertising and other forms of owned media. The
reason is that publicity relies on what we call an implied third-party endorsement—
communication that is not initiated by the company.
Principle: When news media run a story or give a positive mention to a brand, it
creates a halo of respect for the message because of the perceived objectivity of the
medium.
Word of Mouth
Interactivity starts with personal communication, and that’s why word of mouth has
caught the attention of brand communication planners. The point is that the closer the
medium is to a dialogue or the more users can generate or manipulate the content, the
more the brand communication moves away from traditional advertiser-controlled
one-way advertising.
The core of interactivity is personal conversation, and why it is important in brand
communication. A study of media use by the BIGresearch firm, found that the most
influential form of communication is word of mouth. The finding was supported by
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other research that has found word of mouth to be the most important influence on
consumer decision making—considerably more important than traditional media
advertising.
Rather than top down, word-of-mouth brand messages flow side to side, creating a
network of shared brand experiences and impressions that interconnect within
extended communication networks—both personal and professional. In other words,
friends (and business colleagues) talk to friends, and each person has his or her own
network of contacts through which messages can spread.
Principle: The more interactive a medium and the closer it is to a dialogue, the more
personal and persuasive the communication experience.
Buzz and Viral Communication
Brand communication planners have developed a growing respect for media that
generate buzz—a cycle of word-of-mouth interactions, either personal or online,
within a network of friends. The idea is to get people talking about a brand because
we recognize that the most important factor in consumer decision making, next to
personal experience with the brand, is the opinions of others.
Buzz is best generated by disrupting common patterns of thinking—in other words,
the idea needs to be new and surprising. The information also generates buzz when it
is “interesting.” In face-to-face communication, the topics are more conversational
and not as focused on “interesting” ideas. Being interesting is more important for
certain types of social media, but in personal conversation, the focus is more on
top-of-mind personal experiences.
Marketers should match the medium with the message in a word-of-mouth strategy—
interesting idea for face-to-face communication and experiential for social media.
The term viral communication describes the way a message spreads on the Internet
through interconnected networks of acquaintances. The spread of messages depends
totally on consumers creating buzz through their own e-mails and social media
chatter.
B2C2C Influence
Some media plans are specifically designed to reach influential or early adopters
whose opinions are valued by others. These strategies focus on finding the right
individuals to deliver a message—that is, the best-connected people at the hub of an
extended social network who will like a brand or brand message and promote it
among the people they know.
It takes sophisticated sociographic networking mapping to find them, but generally
they are described as community or fashion leaders, well-known experts, or people
you turn to for advice. This word-of-mouth marketing strategy is known as brand
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advocacy or customer referral. The idea is not just to create buzz but also to connect
with influential, high- quality contacts that will spread the brand’s story.
An expansion and modification of the traditional B2C marketing concept proposes
that a marcom message may emanate from a business and then move to key
customers and influencers who then talk about it with other consumers in the target
market. The important part of this model of word-of-mouth influence is the C2C
aspect. Because of the interactive network, messages move back and forth between
and among consumers. The messages may even recirculate back from consumers to
key influential customers who are in touch with the business or maybe directly back
to the business. The point is that this model identifies not only how messages
circulate but also how influential people in the network make their opinions known
and spread their influence.
This B2C2C model illustrates the important role of a brand advocate—that key
customer or stakeholder— who has positive things to share about a brand within a
circle of friends and contacts. These are critical earned mentions, and that’s why
organizations track social media conversations to identify these important
interactions.
Principle: A B2C2C strategy is designed to move a message from a business to key
influential customers who then talk about it with other consumers—and messages
may use the same route to come back to the business.
Social Media Mentions
At its core, social media is online word of mouth that allows users to express
themselves, interact with friends, publish their own content on the Internet, and refer
to brands and products they like. Certain characteristics of social media—personal
content, user engagement, social relationships, and group dynamics—create social
engagement that helps individuals, particularly young people, develop a sense of self,
according to one professor. Digital conversations among friends create opportunities
for researchers to get raw, unfiltered brand impressions from consumers.
Twitter or Microblogs
These permit posts of fewer than 140 characters. These mini-posts, called tweets, invite
users to share their daily doings and immediate thoughts with followers of the microblog.
Generally, the followers are people known to the tweeter, although in the case of fans,
they may approach the size and scale of a large mass audience.
Twitter posts are searchable based on their hashtags, which operate like key words.
Tagging by inserting a hash symbol (#) before a word in a tweet makes that word a
category or topic that can be tracked. People tweeting about a brand or company will
tag their post with the hash symbol plus the company name. Brand stewards can
follow the tag to see the stream of related mentions. Brands can’t assume that
sponsored hashtags will generate the desired response.
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Twitter has become the medium of choice for complaints. Customers can spend many
minutes on the phone waiting to talk to customer service—or get lost in the menu
options; however, Twitter messages are quick and easy. Plugged-in companies follow
these tweets and are quick to respond— often with a telephone call, which beats
waiting in a phone queue for a customer service person to answer.
Advertising messages also can appear on Twitter as part of a user’s stream of
messages. A growing group of tweeters have signed up to allow advertisers to send
commercial messages under their name. Sometimes the ads are testimonials
embedded in a person’s regular stream of tweets; others turn over their stream to an
ad broker that inserts messages for brands and organizations.
Reviews and Comments
The development of social media has seen reviews pop up all over the Web. Amazon
features customer-contributed reviews of its books and other products. A secondary
industry has even built up around paid reviews by ordinary people for e-commerce
sites. Another type of mention is the comments section that follows at the end of
stories and blogs in the online news media. If it’s a business-related topic, these
comments are also important to monitor by brand stewards. Consumer reviews are
powerful because, they offer the illusion of truth.
The Media of Sharing
People talk about brands online. Fan pages exist for many brands where communities
of people, usually loyal users, focus on or follow a favorite brand, and share good
brand experiences. Advertisers use video clips, quizzes, downloadable gifts like
ringtones and icons, and, of course, links to their own websites, on their fan pages.
Fans also share negative experiences and complaints. There are even hate sites for
some brands where critics gather to complain.
Online Communities
Fans are an example of an online virtual community organized around a topic, brand,
or shared interest. Brand communities are also ways to develop loyalty and strong
brand relationships in partnership with the brand. The Harley Owners Group (HOGs)
is probably the best-known brand community and one of the biggest, with more than
1 million members. In addition to local groups, the HOG community is supported
with its own website, www.hog.com.
Social media are international and sites based on sharing are important. Sites that
engage communities include Flickr, which is an online image and video management
website; YouTube, the giant video posting service; and Tumblr, which is a
blog-hosting platform where millions of users post their blogs that get re-posted as
“tumblogs.” Instagram is a photo-sharing social network that is known for its
photo-editing capabilities. Google+ invites viewers to share games and streaming
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images as well as photos, hangouts, and events. SoundCloud is a Facebook app that
lets users share sounds—voices, music, or other audio forms. Pinterest, which is the
third most popular social site after Facebook and Twitter, allows users to pin images,
videos, and other things that they find interesting to their pinboards. It’s a sharing site
in that images can be “repinned” and passed along to friends. Marketers can join
these online communities by buying ads or by posting images or blogs.
Social games are the most popular type of shared-interest app on Facebook, which
inspired Google+ to jump into this market. Facebook players spend, on average,
about 45 minutes with a game.
Social games amass a dedicated community of players who spend money on game
currency they can use to buy virtual products. They also engage in business as they
buy and sell things. Brands can enter into the game in various ways, but usually they
participate by buying a location from which they, too, can do business.
Some of these online and mobile video games charge for a download, but many bring
in revenue from selling ads and sponsorships or selling products within the game. The
next change will see “cloud” games that live on the Internet and are streamed to
computers or handheld devices.
Social media relationships offer opportunities for brand messages, particularly as
people serve as viral marketing agents. You may have already seen some movie
trailers and album posters on the pages of your friends. These trailers and posters may
actually represent user-generated ads, that is, content of commercial nature that is
created or posted on the pages of users in social media that promotes a product,
service, or cause.
Crowdsourcing
This is a tool used by researchers for extended focus groups. That’s also how the
online encyclopedia Wikipedia was developed by mobilizing a digital crowd to
provide collective intelligence. In marketing, crowdsourcing can be used by shoppers
to discover and select products as well as generate ideas for new products.
Earned and Interactive Media Considerations
The opportunities brought to brand communication by word of mouth and social media
are exciting; however, there are some things to think about in deploying media strategies
in these new areas, such as dealing with negative communication and fake messages as
well as estimating the true price of digital media messages.
Dealing with Negatives and Fakes
An unhappy customer is more than just one person’s bad experience, particularly in
retailing, because of the power of word of mouth. People share these experiences, and
those conversations get passed on.
Research has found that although 6 percent of unhappy shoppers will contact the store
with their complaints, 31 percent will tell other people about the unhappy experience.
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And, half of the people in the study reported that they have avoided a store because of
someone else’s negative experience. The study concluded that if 100 people have a
bad experience, a retailer stands to lose between 32 and 36 current or potential
customers. It’s important for marketers to intervene in some way to turn the negative
impression into a positive one.
Another problem is fake sites that can damage brand reputation. The Internet in most
Western countries is a wide-open system with little policing. Phony likes and paid
reviews damage trust even if some brand supporter is behind the effort to puff up the
brand’s positive mentions. Fakes and phony likes also undermine the credibility of
the site.
Cheap but Not Free
Charges for the use of digital media, particularly in the owned, interactive, and earned
categories, are relatively low compared to media budget busters like television. At the
same time, they don’t have the reach that mass media like television have. But that
doesn’t mean they are free. Most of the digital media demand resources, such as
staffing, hardware and software systems, maintenance and operational support, and,
perhaps, fees. In all cases, Internet marketers must budget for the brand monitoring
systems that cull mentions from the Internet.
These listening systems also need metrics to track volume and determine the level of
the impact. A word of caution: Social media opens up opportunities for those valuable
referrals where one friend talks to another about a brand. It’s hard to know, however,
how much that happens. It is difficult tracking referrals, as well as calculating the
value of online buzz.
Multiplatform Brand Communication
Media forms are constantly changing shape and moving across what used to be
commonly understood categories. It wasn’t that long ago that we would plan a
television campaign or an out-of-home campaign with a message strategy dominated
by the strengths of a primary medium. But no longer. Owned and earned just aren’t
nice and neat like media categories were in the simpler eras of media planning. It’s a
messy business. Now we talk about how various media function and how these
functions are interrelated and can be used to extend each other’s reach and impact.
We use the word platforms—to talk about big functions, such as public relations,
promotions, direct marketing—and big packages of media, such as print, broadcast,
social media, viral media, search media, and mobile media. They are all platforms.
Multiplatform media planning is complicated because sometimes the same types of
media—paid, owned, and earned—are used in these different platforms.
One of the biggest differences in 21st-century media is that media planning now
operates not only across a variety of media but also across a multitude of platforms
and marcom areas. The multiplatform use of blogs, linked social networks, and online
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communities (sports and celebrity fans and brand communities), as well as traditional
media to engage customers and other stakeholders, is designed to engage them
personally and build brand relationships.
Viral Marketing
Viral marketing combines the marketing perspective with social media to create
brand-focused viral communication strategies and campaigns. Designed to deliver a
groundswell of opinion, buzz, or marketplace demand for a product, viral marketing
initiates online communication to circulate a brand message among and between
family, friends, and other contacts.
Principle: Conversation-based social media through such sites as Facebook and
Twitter is word-of-mouth advertising on steroids.
Depending on public interest in the topic, this practice can distribute a message to an
ever- widening network, and messages can flash across the Internet like wildfire.
Viral video technology has made it possible for interesting videos from a variety of
sources (ads, films, and YouTube) to be sent from one friend to another in a vast
network of personal connections.
Viral communication has a dark side, too. A worry for planners is that viral messages
can also spread negative stories or even be used to organize a boycott against a brand.
Negative word of mouth moves like a flash flood through the Internet. It probably
moves even faster than the fun stuff and can do immense damage to a brand’s
reputation.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing mixes different kinds of media together in a strategy to drive
consumer interaction and build widespread brand visibility and awareness, in a way
similar to viral marketing. Brands can sometimes instigate the viral process, but
there’s no guarantee the word will spread, and the brand can certainly not control it.
Principle: Marketers who use social media recognize the value in conversations and
customer relationship– building communication.
The reason social networking sites are so attractive to marketers is that they engage
the power of friendship-based influence. Because of these relationships, network
members are more likely to respond to messages on the sites, including ads, if they
are effective at becoming part of the social context. Social media also are good with
local campaigns, particularly for small businesses.
A limitation is that social media’s posts and conversations may not convert prospects
to customers as well as a more directly associated tool, such as search marketing.
Another aspect of social media and viral communication is that, for better or worse,
these media mentions and viral videos can live forever.
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Integration of Platforms
Brand communication is more diverse and complex than ever before. Not only do
brand messages move from one medium to another, but they start in one form, say
print or television, and wind up as a YouTube video that you can watch on your
cell phone.
But we haven’t seen anything yet. A New York Times article described new media
forms, such as Internet-connected glasses and wearable computers, not to mention
voice-activated assistants like the iPhone’s Siri or Microsoft’s experiments with
gesture-recognition computer programs. The idea is that computer-accessible
instant information will become ubiquitous, and the computers that drive these
new media forms will be able to do much more than search on command.
Although these technological fantasies will open up unexplored and new
opportunities for brand communication, we shouldn’t fail to note that the media
we have are also changing their shapes, and that, too, opens up new opportunities.
In this chapter’s A Matter of Principle feature, a member of this book’s advisory
board looks into the future to see even more changes as the shape-shifting
continues with old media, morphing into new types of digital forms.
END-OF-CHAPTER SUPPORT
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