Influencers and Earned Media

I’ve been working on social strategies and campaigns for a few different clients lately and I’ve noticed that a lot of people I talk to outside of the advertising/marketing business (and some inside it) do not know the terms ‘influencer’ and ‘earned media.’ This is something that I spend a lot of time teaching people about because in the world of social media these are two of the most important terms you will come across.

First, influencers. These are the people that cause action in other people. These are not necessarily those that have the most followers on twitter, or those that have the most page likes on Facebook (though that is a good start). These are those people who get people to click on links posted, reply to their posts, leave comments, share the tweets or posts with their circles so that it is distributed virally. If you can get something to organically catch the eye of an influencer in your field you are going to see awesome traffic growth and sales from it. You can also bring things to their attention. I’m not talking necessarily about paid posts here, but just bringing something to their attention and letting it go from there. It can be a gamble, but it can really help distribute your content to a much wider audience that can be very, very, very relevant.

Earned media is the second term, and it is related to the first. This is when your content is shared organically through social networks. You can place things like online video and promote it through paid media, but that shouldn’t be the end of it. In the days where TV and print were our only media you had to pay for all the views you got (with the exception of pass-along views for print media). Online though, you should place your paid media in places where it has the most potential to be passed along, thereby generating ‘earned media.’ You earn this pass along through creating relevant, compelling content that they want to share and by making it easy for them to share it.

Those two terms are the basis for any social or online campaign that Star Moose creates. Depending on your business you influencers are going to be different. You probably won’t see @ConanOBrien hawking hair care products (but then again you might…), the important thing is to find out where your target audience goes online for information and entertainment. Then, all you have to do is have us create some content (be it video, print, interactive, or a combination) that they will actually share. That seems simple, right? It is… kinda.

This post originally appeared on the Star Moose Blog.