Earned media is publicity without payment to the person or company who provides the publicity. One of the primary reasons for the buzz is that earned media is often used synonymously with the term “free media”. The other reason for its recent buzz is that platforms for easily distributing earned media – like Facebook and Twitter – have become very popular over the past couple of years.

Despite the recent buzz, the term ‘earned media’ has been in use for more than 20 years since its first reference in a 1988 Newsweek article by Jonathan Alter and Howard Fineman. At the time, the authors were referring to broadcasting one’s message on TV or radio without any payment to the broadcaster. Since then, the application of the term broadened to include any type of mention of a company or brand in the news. This landed earned media firmly in the court of public relations professionals.

Consumer broadcasting accelerated with Email Forwards and Link Building
With the growing popularity of the internet in the late 1990′s, and email in particular, consumers began to send trillions of emails and many companies attempted to find the next big email forward hit (think dancing baby) or tell-a-friend program.

At the same time, online search engines started to give away billions of clicks for free to websites who appeared in their listing; listings were gained partially through linking between websites. Businesses, called SEOs, quickly appeared to help businesses take advantage of the opportunity and in the process have developed a $3B market for this service.

New terms emerge
As the internet boom picked up steam in 1999 and later after it deflated in the early 2000′s, the opportunities for earned media continued to grow and soon word of mouth marketing became a popular method for marketers to reach consumers. Word of mouth marketing refers to consumers telling other consumers about a product or brand with professionals focused on facilitating this process. Similar to word of mouth marketing, viral marketing refers to consumers passing along a specific marketing message to other consumers (coupons, promotions, entertainment, tools, etc.)

Social media provides consumers with drastic improvement over email for mass broadcast capabilities
More recently, social applications like Blogger, Digg, Facebook, Youtube and Twitter (ie. blogs, link sharing services, and social networks) provided consumers with a superior forum to broadcast their thoughts, opinions and ideas. Whereas previous earned media broadcast opportunities were from central authorities determining who got airplay, social applications enabled consumers to reach hundreds or thousands of people with one unfiltered broadcast. The power to guide is now in the consumer’s hands and they are actively endorsing companies, products, and ideas to their friends, family and colleagues.

The old adage that a happy customer tells two people and an unhappy customer tells 10 has now been amplified with social applications so that a happy customer tells 200 people and an unhappy customer tells 1,000.

Earned media is not reserved to social networks
Companies that earn media best always invest resources into growing the opportunity. This could be in the form of public relations, SEO, promotions, software development, customer service and hundreds of other ways to build and communicate one’s brand. In the end, earned media is the ultimate branding exercise where the company educates the public on its products and then observes how the market communicates that teaching back to itself.

If you would like additional information on this topic or to meet with an advisor to discuss earned media, please contact a Thrivepoint Advisor.

© 2009. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Google Analytics is free but it does cost you when used to evaluate your Adwords campaign. It hides the most important piece of data when evaluating your campaign – the search query – and instead shows you the keyword you purchased. This seemingly minor distinction can make the costs of your Adwords campaign soar if you do not take steps to fix it.

First let’s define the difference between the keyword and query:

• The Keyword is the term used to target your advertisement.
• The Query is the term the user actually types into the search box.

Both Keyword and Query are usually different on each click transaction given the complicated nature of how Google, Yahoo and others’ algorithms match their ads. These sophisticated algorithms take your keywords and match it to queries it deems relevant to users. This is done to promote a good user experience but it also helps maximize their revenue by attempting to increase the amount of clicks each advertisement generates.

This approach works well for all parties so long as your goal is to generate relevant visits to your website. However, if you have a specific conversion goal in mind (like generating leads or sales) on your website, then the bluring of the difference between Keyword and Query by the algorithm will hurt your ability to effectively target your ads because of the default Broad match type which takes many liberties in targeting ads.

Looking at queries can help you pinpoint target the queries that are generating your conversions and get rid of those that do not. Generally, marketers use Website Analytics to look at the query log files to determine which queries drive traffic to your website and then adjust their keywords to save money from being spent on queries that are not driving conversions. However, Google Analytics does not let you see the query in its basic functionality. Using the 80/20 rule, you might find that 80% of your spend is on queries that do not work – - wouldn’t it be nice to spend that 80% on the queries that work?

Here is how you can start saving money today by looking at query analysis without switching from Google Analytics:

• Use the Google Adwords Query Report.
  • Pros: This report will show you the queries that generate impressions and clicks for your campaigns.
  • Cons: It tends to aggregate queries with low volume into an “other” category and unless you also use Google Conversion Tracker, it will not show you conversions.
• To take it a step deeper, you can customize your implementation of Google Analytics to track queries.
  • Pros: You can track both keywords and query side by side down to the conversion.
  • Cons: The implementation is relatively advanced so you may want to hire someone with specific experience doing this.

Contact us if you need help configuring Google Analytics to save money from your Adwords campaign.