By Norm JohnstonSOCIAL

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Somewhere on Madison Avenue there is a large vat of Kool-Aid that a fair portion of the industry has been sipping for the past year. You can recognize those who have imbibed by their hundred-mile vacant stare and endless incantations featuring POE. Not Edgar Allen, but the media variety - specifically paid, owned, and earned. POE and its endless variations have become the topic du jour for countless industry conferences and articles. In fact, I don’t think a day has gone by in the last year without someone mentioning it to me. I swear my six year old whispered “POE” when I put him to bed the other night.

To those who haven’t indulged in the Kool-Aid let me briefly explain. Paid media - the P - is the historical inventory brands have bought such as TV spots, print ads, and online display banners. It’s the stuff we’ve always done, just now more digital and on more devices. Owned media - the O - includes the content and experiences that a brand largely controls, everything from your Web site to your product

packaging to your stores. Earned media - you guessed it, the E - is arguably the new kid on the block. We used to call it PR and word-of-mouth, but it now takes shape in a variety of ways, most notably Likes and +’s. Brands can’t control earned media but they can certainly help create, influence, mitigate, harness, and distribute it.

Now you may have noticed that the E has received a disproportionate share of the industry chatter. Poor P and O often get left behind, but they are important and do play a critical role; more on that later. The reason earned media gets so much attention these

days is primarily down to the 900-million (and growing) gorilla in the room. In a very short time, Facebook has created the ultimate ubiquitous global platform for consumers to share content and opinions on everything from friends to movies to brands. In effect, Facebook has become the ultimate vehicle for word-of-mouth…positive or negative. If you get it right, you can create an army of advocates that will help your brand grow up to 2.5 times more than the category average (Bain, 2010). According to Syncapse, fans are 41% more likely than non-fans to recommend a fanned product to friends. Once these

discoverable shareable

Owned mediadrives engagementand understanding

Earned mediawill build advocacyand favourability,

loyalty andrecommendation

Paid media will sparkinterest and ensureyour owned content

is discoverable

PAID OWNED EARNED Fans are 41% more likely than non-fans to recommend a fanned product.

% buying having becomeaware via family friends

% buying having becomeaware via advertising

Index WOM to advertising

47% 62% 59% 58%

22% 31% 25% 29%

216 202 239 199

based on aggregate across all brands

word of mouth is two times more powerful in driving trial than awareness created by advertising

Source: TNS

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folks become a fan, they spend on average an additional $71.84 more than a non-fan. Recent TNS research found that word-of-mouth is twice as powerful as advertising in driving trial. All of this goes some way to explaining Facebook’s recent IPO evaluation: in a world of frictionless sharing, advocacy (or the opposite) is more widespread and more important than ever in building brand equity and sales. A significant side benefit of this earned media is that it increases visits to your owned destinations, whether it’s your store, your official YouTube channel or your

brand Web site, which creates a positive ripple effect throughout your marketing efforts. For example, the more folks who visit your Web site, the higher your Google search rankings, which accounts for over 60% of all clicks on the search results page. And of course the better your “natural” performance in search, the less you need to pay Google for search keywords, thus freeing up precious paid media to help generate more advocacy elsewhere. In fact, recent Nielsen research found that an intelligent combination of paid and earned media within Facebook has a higher incremental impact on multiple brand metrics. Even TV can play a huge role

in driving Facebook fan acquisition; just ask Old Spice. These days, it’s not uncommon to see some sort of social component now baked into all advertising: QR codes on print, Facebook addresses on TV spots, Like and + buttons on Yahoo display ads. Paid and earned media can happily coexist and thrive together.

Confused? You’re not the only one. Frankly, it may be easier getting to grips with quantum physics or David Hasselhoff’s enduring popularity in Germany.

I think there are two simple conclusions you can reach from this increasingly complex and connected media landscape. First, positive earned media not only leads to more sales, it also helps boost your owned media and focuses your paid media on where it can make a real difference. Second, all three forms of media are increasingly dependent on each other. Mixing and managing them together in the right way will simply give you better results. At Mindshare we’ve taken these two core beliefs to heart and re-engineered our entire process to weave social and owned media throughout our way of working from the beginning. It’s required many changes.

However, there are two specific and simple steps worth highlighting as they in particular help brands easily configure and optimize all of their POE activity.

In a world of frictionless sharing, advocacy is moreimportant than ever.

TV Campaign with Facebook Call To Action

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First, our Connections Architecture process is a simple, intuitive, and highly-visual

way for all stakeholders - clients, agencies, and publishers - to map out the role, interdependencies, and the ideal consumer journey(s) through all of their paid, owned, and earned media, assets, and initiatives. Think information architecture applied to your entire marketing ecosystem, both offline and online. In short, it connects all the dotsand ensures everyone is on the same page.Second, our Connections Planner enables our planning teams to use specific historical market and brand data to run through various POE scenarios to determine what levels of

activity and investment should generate the highest levels of reach and results. It puts science behind all of the POE theory, and a level of predictability and accountability to that former wild child of earned media. It also ensures you are squeezing every asset available to you, and it’s all based on real data, including industry norms and models such as Millward Brown’s viral predictability research.

Both tools go a long way to ensuring that “E” and “O” are optimized and baked into a brand’s plans from the beginning, and not

overshadowed by that big, historical “P” of so many traditional media plans. It’s not only a new way of planning your media mix, our approach also redefines and broadens media to include things like packaging and Facebook fans. It’s why initiatives like Nike’s recent #MAKEITCOUNT have been so successful.

For Nike, Mindshare architected an extensive and integrated POE program that used a Twitter hashtag across paid and owned media to generate significant amounts of earned media. Furthermore, we turned #MAKEITCOUNT tweets from professional and amateur athletes into an advocacy program, featuring their handles and responses in the advertising itself, thus creating a virtuous circle. In the end, Nike simply put advocacy and earned media right at the forefront of the planning process. When talking about creative, Facebook call this social by design.

In the media world, we prefer to think of it as social by plan.

Connections Architecture

Connections Planner

Think information architecture applied to your entire marketing ecosystem

Nike #MAKEITCOUNT Campaign

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