Owned, earned, social and paid - it's all about trust versus control
I have seen a lot of terms being thrown around that aren't consistently defined. So, to add the the confusion, I have taken what I thought was the best of the bunch - and old Forrester report - and improved it.*
If you want to see the original Forrester chart, click here.
So, you may be asking, what's the difference between "earned media" and "social media". To me, it's a matter of degree. This blog, much as I think of it, is not the same as the New York Times. I'm not a professionally trained journalist. I don't employ fact-checkers and, most-crucially, I don't have the kind of audience that the NYT does. If you are reading this, there's a good chance that you have a personal connection with me.
If you have a personal connection with me, that does interesting things to trust. On the one hand, you will trust me more because you have a better sense of my motivations and my biases. On the other hand, you'll trust me less because you know that I have less access to information than a professional news source.
But trust is an incredibly important aspect of messaging. To trust the message, you have to trust the messenger. But the further away from the company, the less control that company has over the message. So, that's the tradeoff:
Because advertisements are served in the context of some other information, that both affects the control and the trust, so that sometimes paid media is less trusted than owned media. For the reasons above, I also argue that earned media is sometimes more trusted than social media.
Ok, so now the "so what?" part. Well, the reality is that these are all connected. An individual is likely to encounter the message from multiple sources. But the message needs to be appropriate to the messenger. In order to know that, companies have to be able to read the reaction to what they're saying.
And so, listening becomes a vital aspect to a company's communication strategy. And the lines between PR and marketing grow ever more blurry.
*Yes, I'm aware that "improving" is a highly obnoxious term, but why would I change it if I didn't think I was improving it?