'Earned media' is not a synonym for public relations

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

“Categorising media as Paid, Owned and Earned isn’t particularly useful. In fact, it simply appears to reinforce increasingly irrelevant functional silos.”

That’s how I opened a blog post back in November, The Influence View of Content , and three incidents over the last couple of weeks have redoubled my determination to cut this crap.

Names have been changed…

Incident 1

Anne: “So our marketing team looks after the website, the blog and Facebook. And PR is obviously earned media – the traditional media relations, blogger relations and the like. They cover Twitter too, at least most of the time.”

Me: “So if we’re looking at things like that, let me ask where the concept of shared media takes us… the owned stuff that has earned a share – a ‘Like’, a RT, a +1 for example.”

Earned-Media on Philip Sheldrake

'Earned media' is not a synonym for public relations

Incident 1