Integration the secret sauce to making new media work effectively

By Robert Wheatley

Photo Credit: Car Culture

In the year ahead, social media will no longer be viewed as that bright new star sitting on the horizon and bolted-on like a shiny hood ornament to brand marketing programs. Instead it will be integrated into all facets of brand communication. Each layer of brand outreach will benefit from social integration. But what is the right mix of media tools? What media platforms are we talking about now?

With so many channels of communication available, it may feel like we’re confronted with a daunting array of narrowly focused options. There’s great temptation here for scale reasons simply to revert to traditional strategies founded on interruption media (we covered this in yesterday’s post). There’s a better path. Getting off the persuasion bandwagon and onto the engagement trail involves understanding the three primary media platforms, their role and then looking to optimize your involvement in each of them.

Shannon Paul published a great piece on new media that brought to life some of Dave Fleet’s thinking on how to understand the interrelationships between the primary forms of media that brands must successfully navigate. Please read both of them.

Why does this matter? The media landscape has evolved because consumer behavior has changed – they control engagement. There are three primary components. Let’s take a look at these pieces and how they fit with one another.

Click to enlarge

Forrester research helps bring this conversation to life with the chart above. Here you see the three primary paths of marketing communications activity:

Earned Media – essentially outreach to mainstream editorial media (TV, newspapers, magazines and online versions of same) and bloggers. “Earned” involves convincing others to use and deploy your stories and content. It depends on the brand’s ability to package and present interesting and relevant material that third parties will publish or repurpose. This lies at the headwaters of viral communication and WOM.

• It is at once a powerful channel but does not offer full control over the final outcome. Hard to forecast because it is earned and thus predict scale. Viral distribution in this case rests on the uniqueness, value and inherent stickiness of the content.

Owned Media – this is perhaps the most intriguing development to come: brands as publishers and creators of content. Owned media begins with company web sites and goes on to include Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, YouTube channels and other communities a brand may create.

• This takes time and patience to scale. Credibility is always an issue because of the lingering view that brands are only focused on their self-interests. Thus brand reputation is integral to acceptance of created content. Over time, for savvy brands and businesses, this may become an increasingly important and commanding channel.

Paid media – company generated messaging placed in digital and mainstream media through ads, SEO and sponsorships.

• By virtue of it being transactional, it is at once scale-able but often lacking in traction and engagement due to inherent credibility issues. As well consumers often recognize and tune out the interruptive delivery system. Messaging is created and thus controlled, and tends to play better with brand fans.

These three components together will form the basis for marketing communications strategies. Optimizing the balance and interactivity of these components is vital establishing a baseline of engagement and translating those contacts into brand preference and then sales.

Social media should be integrated across all three. Earned and owned are closely related as one can feed the other. The first two channels deliver relevant engagement and credibility while paid offers scale. The combination of all three is potent especially when messaging is delivered seamlessly.

To date, earned and owned may be underfunded so we recommend considering a more optimized mix that allows these points of brand contact to flourish and reach their potential for greater impact – especially to secure new customers.

Tomorrow we’ll look more deeply into the “owned” category and opportunities that may present.

What do you think?