earned media evolved

Earned MediaEvolved

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2Copyright © 2011 PR Newswire Association LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Doug Clark, General Manager of Social Media and Customer Engagement at Audi of America, tells a story that exemplifies one of the most significant transformations communications has undergone in recent years – the evolution of earned media.

Clark describes how Audi’s fast social media response to a Washington, D.C. snowstorm

created a hail of positive user-generated stories. Audi’s careful monitoring of it all then led

to the discovery of a YouTube video that the company later used as part of a traditional TV

commercial – which the company then promoted in social media.

“We were quick. We took what people were voting on and saying, and we were able to

bring traditional and social media together, to greater effect,” states Clark.1

Clark’s story is indicative of massive changes in the earned media landscape. Clearly,

the emergence of the social layer on top of the internet has fostered powerful new

forms of earned media. Traditional forms of earned media are morphing as well, as they

increasingly interconnect with socially driven earned media.

At the same time, brand-owned media has become more viable than ever before, and is

growing exponentially. In fact, 60% of marketers responding to a July 2011 study plan

to increase their spend in content marketing over the next 12 months and, on average,

are spending 27% of their total marketing budget on content creation, distribution and

promotion.2

Earned Media Evolved

White PAPeR

The emergence of social media and owned media has radically evolved the nature of earned media. Communicators must evolve with it, or risk irrelevance.


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1. Social + traditional = More impact, Doug Clark, the Gravity Summit, September 20112. 2011 B2B Marketing Spending and trends, Content Marketing institute and MarketingProfs, July 2011


What’s clear is that entirely new patterns of influence are emerging among traditional

media, new media, social media and brand-owned content. They are prompting public

relations professionals to rethink old paradigms, embrace new opportunities that demand

entirely new ways of thinking – and to act and react in real time.

This white paper explores the evolution of earned media. Additionally, it discusses PR

innovations made possible by earned media’s evolution, and the tools required to compete

in the earned media evolved world.

The earned media evolution: emerging patterns of influence

In little more than a decade, new media, owned media and social media have reinvented

the way information flows through business and society. Traditional media ceded audience

share to upstart Web-based outlets for news and information. Brands began to produce

content in their own right. And then social media emerged to rewire the way people find,

consume and share information.

Now, consensus is emerging that only by coordinating communications in

an integrated way across all four of these spheres of influence (traditional,

new, owned and social) can today’s communications professional maximize

influence – and thereby maximize their earned media benefit.

The evidence is incontrovertible: Americans now spend some 15% of their

time online using a social network, according to research firm comScore.3

And brands have moved right along with them onto Facebook, Twitter,

LinkedIn, Groupon and the like. For example, 84% of Fortune Global 100

companies participate in at least one social media platform, and many

have a growing number of accounts in multiple social venues, according to

Burson-Marsteller research.4

The four intersecting spheres of media influence represent a new decision

landscape. Consumers and B-to-B customers are turning for advice not

only to traditional media, but also to new media, branded content and their networks of

friends, peers and favorite tastemakers, trendsetters and thought leaders.

This evolved, interrelated set of media spheres is the landscape in which modern marketers

and PR professionals must “earn” media attention nowadays.

As a result, “We’re seeing our customers using our distribution network, our engagement

platforms and our monitoring tools in new ways,” says Scott Mozarsky, Executive Vice

President and Chief Commercial Officer at PR Newswire. “They’re streaming content across


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White PAPeR Earned Media Evolved

We’re seeing our customers using our distribution network, our engagement platforms and our monitoring tools in new ways.

“

”Scott Mozarsky

Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer,

PR Newswire

3. the 2010 U.S. Digital Year in Review, comScore, February 2011, http://www.comscore.com/Press_events/Presentations_Whitepapers/2011/2010_US_Digital_Year_in_Review

4. 2011 Global Social Media Check-up, Burson-Marsteller, February 2011, http://www.slideshare.net/BMGlobal-News/bursonmarsteller-2011-global-social-media-checkup

http://www.comscore.com/Press_events/Presentations_Whitepapers/2011/2010_US_Digital_Year_in_Review


channels to all kinds of traditional, and new, influencers. And they’re using our social

media monitoring tools to analyze the streams coming back at them, to ferret out the

insight and opportunity that lies hidden in those returning streams.”

So brands are now part of an always-on flow of content, conversations and analytics.

“Brands’ ability to proactively manage their ‘brandstreams’ will dictate their success in

leading conversations, protecting their reputations, ensuring brand coherence – and

driving business results,” notes Mozarsky.

Audi and Dell listen to their brands’ Social Echoes

As people engage each other regarding the subjects and brands they know well or want to

know better, the millions of conversations occurring daily (including 200 million tweets per

day on Twitter alone5) constitute a vast reservoir of opinion and insight that could never

before be collected and analyzed.

PR Newswire has coined the term Social Echo to describe the powerful reverberation of

conversations around your brand that occur in social networks.

Social Echo has the power to make or break a brand; and those who understand this are

actively engaged in listening to their Social Echo and finding strategic ways to influence

the conversations that power it.

That listening requires the use of still-evolving tools to analyze discussions

of specific topics, people, brands and your products and services as articles

and blogs are being posted, comments added, Facebook pages updated,

tweets tweeted. Used properly, these tools also can identify sources of

influence and the patterns of how that influence propagates through

different subjects and networks.

Just such an analysis of Audi’s Social Echo led to the engagement and

opportunity that Clark describes in the opening of this paper.

“We had eight inches of snow one night this past winter, and we don’t do

well with snow in Virginia,” Clark says. “The next morning we had a post

out: ‘Did your car get you stuck or home; tell us your Audi Quattro story.’

Within hours, we had thousands of people talking to us about their drive

home, and how their car got them there, and how they were so excited. Real

time, people engaged!” enthuses Clark.6

“And because we listen and engage out there, other good things happen,” he continues.

“Less than a week later, we saw a journalist who’d been out in one of our Audi R8s, testing


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5. 200 Million tweets Per Day, twitter blog, June 20116. Social + traditional = More impact, Doug Clark, the Gravity Summit, September 2011

Within hours, we had thousands of people talking to us about their drive home, and how their car got them there ... Real time, people engaged!

“

”Doug CLark

General Manager of Social Media and Customer

Engagement, Audi of America


it during the blizzard. He posted a video to YouTube. We saw the video was getting

great pickup. So our traditional ad agency decided, ‘Let’s have a Quattro TV ad where we

work with the journalist’s video.’ So we turned that video into a television ad, and then

promoted it via social,” Clark explains.

In the B-to-B realm, Dell’s Rishi Dave, Executive Director of Online Marketing, explains that

listening to the company’s Social Echo has helped Dell discover new patterns of influence

among its constituents.

“For B-to-B selling, social media has caused authority to shift dramatically,”

Dave says. “We used to just want to get the Editors Choice Award in PC

Magazine. But today, the people influencing our customers are in small-to-

medium-sized communities, with small blogs … the people actually telling our

customers what to buy are completely different than what we expected.”

So Dell seeds social media streams with content and listens to and analyzes

the echoes. “We see this extreme set of content that we call a content

river constantly coming on the social Web about our brand, about our

technologies and what we sell. This content river is coming within many

sub-communities, many small communities and many large communities –

and it is continuous,” Dave says.

Insights from these early adopters make clear that listening to your brand’s

Social Echo is an extremely powerful marketing and public relations tool.

It can produce a profoundly deep understanding of a brand’s customers

and prospects, with many implications for research, product development,

sales and more. Your Social Echo is profound research because it’s entirely

authentic – based on real customers’ actual thoughts and behaviors.

The owned media evolution: brand as publisher

The emergence of brand-generated content occurring today is rooted in ubiquitous

internet connectivity – and the more recent, but no less profound (and viral), proliferation

of social media. The result? Brands are able to orchestrate multi-faceted communications

and conversations to/from their constituents, bypassing traditional media.

Importantly, the branded content revolution has another driver. As business decision-

makers and consumers have become exposed to a seemingly limitless volume of content

in myriad new forms, they have learned to rely on their own judgment as to a given

content item’s value. They no longer depend on the proxy of trust and value afforded by

a media brand – for example, a Wired or InformationWeek. This means they’ll consume

content from anybody or any brand – as long as it’s valuable content.


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We used to just want to get the Editors Choice Award in PC Magazine. But today, the people influencing our customers are in small-to-medium-sized communities, with small blogs.

“

”Rishi Dave

executive Director of Online Marketing, Dell



And when a piece of content is valuable enough, it becomes a form of “social currency”

– content that people want to share with their friends, family or business associates

simply because the act of sharing such valuable information or entertainment raises

their own stature.

“What we’re trying to do in social media is not just get customers, but enable our

customers to help us get more customers,” notes Audi’s Clark.

However, to create content good enough to become “social currency,”

brands have to be authentic experts on their chosen topics, adds Joe Pulizzi,

Founder of the Content Marketing Institute (CMI). “Brands have to present

themselves as the thought leader, the expert, the solutions provider for

their customer,” says Pulizzi. “And the requisite is to create lots of targeted,

relevant, valuable information.”

This is what’s causing the previously noted surge in content marketing,

according to Stephen Saunders, Managing Director of DeusM, a company

that creates and manages communities for companies like IBM, Dell and

SAS. “There’s a resurgence in the value of content – a renaissance in content.

People are realizing that content is the cornerstone of any really successful

integrated marketing program,” says Saunders.

Content as social currency

The goal of brand-generated content, of course, is to engage audiences and, ultimately, to

transform them into customers. More and more, that engagement is occurring in social

media – but not necessarily just the big-name social networks.

“Building an outpost for your company on Facebook is not the same thing as adding

to your community – it’s the same thing as adding to Facebook’s community,” notes

Saunders. “Moving engagement onto someone else’s network severely limits your ability

to do things like conduct research into your customers, get them to engage with your

information or persuade them to take a specific action, such as requesting to talk to a

salesperson or downloading a white paper.”

Therefore, among the most important emerging content marketing practices is to have a

central content repository and home community (typically anchored by a blog or blogs),

and then build two-way integration between that site and your presence on Facebook,

Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and other social networks. Saunders calls this approach “social

media amplification.”

Of note, there is no doubt about what type of content is most “amplifiable,” especially

for B-to-B brands, in social media. It is expert content about a given topic that helps your


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People are realizing that content is the cornerstone of any really successful integrated marketing program.

“

”Stephen Saunders

Managing Director, DeusM


audience be more successful. The interviewees consistently describe it as “fact-based,”

“research-oriented,” “instructional,” “actionable” and “news you can use.”

“The top ten blog posts on our site for the last 30 days are all super instructional – and, in

most cases, they have a number in their headline,” agrees CMI’s Pulizzi.

To demonstrate his point, Pulizzi provided the CMI site’s top three traffic-generating posts

for the 30 days prior to April 7, 2011, and the number of times each one was shared on

Facebook or tweeted:

1. 12 things to do after you’ve written a blog post: 661 Facebook shares and 497 tweets

2. 12 reasons to put blogs at the center of your content marketing: 56 Facebook shares and 294 tweets

3. 5 content strategies for boring brands: 31 Facebook shares and 117 tweets

Our interviews with advocates of content marketing in social media have

shown that compelling content combined with intelligently targeted

distribution is becoming the backbone of their earned media strategies.

That content – and the social and traditional media it “earns” – is becoming

the “glue” that re-integrates audiences, regardless of the number of forms,

formats or forums into which those audiences have splintered.

Further, the right content and social media “amplification” approach

can enable communicators to achieve levels of engagement that were

unheard of the last time those audiences were unified – in the context of

traditional mass media. Thus, effective use of brand-generated content in social media

venues enables brands to aggregate fragmented audiences, establish long-term brand

relationships and even generate demand.

Multimedia enhances “earnings”

In this evolved earned media environment, many interviewees mentioned the particular

power of multimedia to engage consumers and B-to-B customers with your brand across

social media channels. And of all the multimedia content formats available, none is seen

as more potent than video.

“Video has gotten to the place where it is the conversation starter,” says Kerry Morgan,

Senior Vice President of Marketing and Communications for United Way of the National

Capital Area.7

Again, research supports interviewees’ anecdotal evidence. Video surpassed peer-to-peer

file sharing during the third quarter of 2010 to become the largest category of broadband


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7. Using Multimedia to Amp Up Your Social echo, PR Newswire, March 2011


Compelling content combined with intelligently targeted distribution is becoming the backbone of earned media.


internet traffic in the United States, at 26.2% of all traffic.8 In addition, surging video usage

for entertainment as well as business and personal communications will raise it to 66% of

all mobile data traffic by 2015.9

Perhaps not surprisingly, then, video and other forms of multimedia content have

supercharged results for marketers who listen to and leverage their brand’s Social Echo.

By studying its own data from thousands of news releases, PR Newswire confirms that

adding multimedia increases viewership online. Adding just a photo increases viewership

by 14% over text-only releases. Adding video gives a 20% advantage.

But it’s when you utilize multiple multimedia elements that the statistics become eye-

popping: releases with text, photo and video elements outperformed text-only by 48%,

and adding other formats (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, PDF files) on top of photo and video

raised viewership 77% beyond text-only releases.10

A thorough exploration of multimedia usage in social media is available in PR Newswire’s

white paper, Using Multimedia to Amp Up Your Social Echo.


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8. Cisco Visual Networking index: Usage Study, Cisco Systems, October 25, 20109. Cisco Predicts Mobile Data traffic explosion, Seeking Alpha, February 1, 2011 10. Multimedia content drives better press release results, Beyond PR, May 2, 2011


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Press releases with multimedia elements generate substantially more views


Earned evolution yields innovative PR uses

The evolved earned media landscape creates opportunities for the humble press release

to work much harder. Once a vehicle for announcing news to editors, the press release

is increasingly being used to influence outcomes – and even to generate qualified leads

directly from a target audience.

In some ways, it’s simple. If you were issuing a press release announcing, say, the release of

a new smartphone, why wouldn’t you include a link to your Web site enabling consumers

on the Web to learn more or make a purchase? If you’ve created excellent original content

– a white paper or webinar, for example – why wouldn’t you issue a press release about it?

Savvy PR professionals – and even some marketers – are doing these things,

and more. They are targeting their press release audiences and measuring

lead generation performance using internal CRM systems, social media

monitoring analytics, tracking codes and services that provide insight into

the number of people clicking on a link, downloading content or registering

for an event. Further, they are using press releases to drive engagement with

their own branded content.

The result, PR professionals say, can be valuable leads obtained at very little

cost, as well as an expansion of one’s marketing database.

“We often include links in our press releases to invite users to download

a study, to go to our Web site to review the information there or perhaps

to register to receive information,” says Jennifer Samuel, Head of

External Communications, Global Industries at audit, tax and advisory

firm KPMG. “We do this as a way to invite engagement, to invite people

to interact with us.”11

Samuel says KPMG currently tracks page views and downloads, but adds

that the metrics they use will get more specific in the future. “This data is

increasingly becoming one of our key performance indicators in terms of our

marketing and communications outreach,” she explains.

Earned media tools must evolve, too

To help communicators better manage this evolved earned media world their tools must

evolve, too, notes PR Newswire’s Mozarsky. He explains that PR Newswire is in the process

of developing a new service platform in response to the new ways that customers are

using its existing offerings.


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We often include links in our press releases to invite users to download a study, to go to our Web site to review the information there or perhaps to register to receive information as a way to invite engagement.

“

”Jennifer Samuel

head of external Communications,

Global industries, KPMG

11. Press releases as lead generators, PR Newswire, July 2011



“Our design point is to empower marketers and PR professionals to participate in the

constant real-time information flows, to analyze new patterns of influence and to engage

audiences across all four different spheres of media – but not in the ‘dis-integrated’ way

they do today, with multiple separate tools for each purpose,” he explains.

Instead, Mozarsky says, these emerging challenges require better, richer audience

engagement tools, and workflow platforms that can help optimize content for specific

audiences while seamlessly targeting audiences now fragmented across traditional media,

new media, owned media – and your own Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other networks.

Conclusion: the opportunity to “own” earned media

PR professionals stand at a pivotal time in the history of communications.

Research reveals that social media usage for marketing and PR is rising on a dramatic

trajectory. Existing analytical tools let us peak at new patterns of influence among

traditional, new, owned and social media. And those peaks demonstrate how adding social

networking to a fixed and mobile internet that enables everyone to connect with everyone

else, all the time, has radically and forever changed the nature of earned media.

These changes, in turn, are radically altering the nature and practice of marketing and

PR, opening up vast opportunities not only to influence media in new ways, but also to

influence purchase decision-makers and to directly generate demand.

No one yet “owns” the evolved earned media landscape; everyone is piling in. PR

departments. Marketing departments. General agencies. Digital agencies. SEO agencies.

Social agencies. Content marketing agencies. Media companies. Editorial consultancies.

Still, only one group represents the true original earned media practitioners – PR

professionals. There’s every opportunity for PR professionals to become the dominant force

in managing the evolved earned media landscape.


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About PR Newswire

PR Newswire (www.prnewswire.com) is the premier global provider of multimedia platforms

and solutions that enable marketers, corporate communicators, sustainability officers,

public affairs and investor relations officers to leverage content to engage with all their key

audiences. Having pioneered the commercial news distribution industry 57 years ago,

PR Newswire today provides end-to-end solutions to produce, optimize and target content –

from rich media to online video to multimedia – and then distribute content and measure

results across traditional, digital, social, search and mobile channels. Combining the world’s

largest multi-channel, multi-cultural content distribution and optimization network with

comprehensive workflow tools and platforms, PR Newswire enables the world’s enterprises

to engage opportunity everywhere it exists. PR Newswire serves tens of thousands of clients

from offices in the Americas, Europe, Middle East, Africa and the Asia-Pacific region, and is a

UBM plc company.


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earned media evolved

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