Earned Media When customers, the press and the public share a brand’s content, talks about the brand through word of mouth, or in other words discuss the brand, this means that the media is earned. Earned media is the publicity that happy customers spread and that the company deserves for delivery a good product or service. It also can be coming with an excellent marketing campaign (Combell, 2013). It could be word of mouth, blogs, forums and sites whereby products and services are conversed, Facebook and Twitter comments (Michael Brito, 2013). Loyal fans of a brand is able to obtain the messages and updates across on their own with these earned media. When an outsider of the company mentions on Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media channel, the company is gaining the benefits of earned media. Earned media can be as simple as a customer spreading positive word of mouth on the Internet right after using a brand and feel the want to share to others because he is satisfied with it. For example, a customer went to a restaurant and feel satisfied after experiencing a good service. He posted a status about his experience and tagged the restaurant location. His friends on Facebook can view the post and might want to find out about the restaurant if they are interested. Within a few moment, many people that uses Facebook is able to view the post when the customer receives “likes” or “shares” on the post about the restaurant on Facebook.
The major benefit of earned media is to gain credibility (Chron, 2016). It is more possible for customers are to think that a product review on an online blog more credible that a 1 minute commercial that features professional actors. Customers will feel that the actors in the commercial are paid to endorse the brand, and therefore it might not be trustworthy. The reason customers are willing to trust online reviews is because it is based on the feedbacks of other customers who actually tried and experience the brand themselves. For instance, many female customers that want to find out which skin care brands are the best will go to the internet to read reviews of different brands and compare with one another rather than watching commercial of the brands. They would want to know the real effects of after using the brands. Customers now days want to hear, listen, and view trusted content from a brand. They automatically will look for comments and feedbacks from the users of a brand before trying out the brand. Therefore, this has made the earned media to become less bias since it is not controlled by the brand and the content is true stories from customers’ experience. Another advantage of earned media is that companies are able to interact with their customers through it (Gil Rudawsky, 2011). Given an example, a customer posted a feedback about a brand on its Facebook page. If the comment is a negative feedback, the company can private message the customer to find out more and try to make improvements after understanding the problem. Earned media is most of the time very cost effective for companies to generate sales because it comes from the mouth of customers especially those that are happy and satisfied with the company product and service. They are more than willingly to share their feedbacks about the brand to their family members and friends. Companies need not pay the customers to spread positive reviews about the brand. Earned media is useful for small firms or new companies because they have limited budget to advertise their products.
The earned media also have some disadvantages, which is having lack of control over it. For example, a restaurant may be able to cover up negative news of food poisoning on paid media such as newspaper, radio station, and the television from spreading it. Yet, customers who are victim of the incident can share the negative news on their personal social network to inform their family members and friends. There also could be possible of facing danger of dissatisfied workers or unhappy customers spreading unproven rumors online which can damage the company’s image and cause negative effects to the business. One aspect that makes earned media becomes a drawback is measurability (John Jantsch, 2014). Although there may be tools that are readily available, companies find it hard to analyze the exact effect of earned media whether it generates sales or leads. One less obvious disadvantage is some brands might be scared of earned media simple because an earned social media campaign could transform into a user-generated storm of harmful publicity (Business Insider, 2013). Earned media also consists of some unseen costs. Time and efforts are required for companies to obtain earned media as it need investment in internal and external social media content generation. But, the real disadvantages have to do with earned media’s hidden costs. It takes time and effort. It requires investment in internal and external social media content generation.