Earned media is media you don’t buy but earn the hard way.
I was reading the insightful post of Fred Wilson about Earned Media and wanted to share the slides he prepared with a friend.
They asked me what “Earned Media” was, and I realized it’s not easy to explain to a non-tech savvy. I just came up with two simple (known) examples: a superbowl commercial versus the JetBlue twitter team.
The SuperBowl commercial costs $3M for 30 seconds of time. 30 seconds in which everyone jumps out of the sofa to get new fresh bears, the bar stool to use the restrooms and order new chicken wings, …. And of course, the $3M doesn’t include the commercial production costs! Yes, you reach potentially an audience of 90 million viewers. Potentially.
On the other side, you have the JetBlue twitter team. JetBlue decided to to have a bunch of people “listen to the twittersphere” and answer some requests, claims, concerns. See below an exchange - isn’t this cool? Can you imagine screaming out (i.e. twittering) that Google suck today because Gmail is down, and then receiving a response saying “Sorry, we know, servers down… Hang on tight!”.
Earned Media would require some more interaction and integration with existing services. Think picture uploads on Flickr, videos on YouTube, a fan page on Facebook, a blog of course, live feeds on JustinTV and UStream, and all that regularly updated.
This is basically called online presence, needs to be lively and requires interaction to the user and users. And the best thing of all: it doesn’t cost a lot.
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