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Mastering Mixed Media to Reach Your Audience
How to Combine Earned, Owned, Shared, and Paid Media for Maximum Impact
Keren Speck
September 24, 2024
What's in store for this edition:
Using 4 types of media for greatest impact
Mastering Mixed Media
Did you know the average consumer has the attention span of a goldfish? 🎏
That’s why it’s so hard in today’s digital landscape to capture a user’s attention. By using a mix of earned, owned, shared, and paid media experiences, you can standout and have bigger impact.
What does this all mean?
Earned Media (the main focus of Public Relations):
✅ Editorial coverage (Broadcast or Print Media)
✅ Online reviews and ratings
✅ Blog posts (on someone else’s blog)
✅ Guest spots on podcasts
✅ Features in newsletters
Why we love earned media? It gives a brand trust and credibility. After all, the saying goes, “It's not what you say about yourself that matters; it's what others say about you that counts.”
Owned Media
✅ Website content
✅ Blog articles (written by you or your company)
✅ Videos produced and posted by you
With owned media you control the narrative. That means you tell the story the way you want.
Consider using brand journalism in your owned media efforts. This is when a company tells its own story through content that informs, entertains, or educates, often using journalistic techniques. You create it! With all the professional tools available now, it’s easier than ever.
💃 🕺Social media content and user-generated content
💬 Collaborative and interactive
🤝 Deeper relationship
🤜 🤛 Builds trust
Shared media is like your social media content and user-generated content coming together to create something new — that’s shared media. It’s collaborative and interactive. When content is shared, co-created, and amplified by both brands and their audiences, it fosters a sense of community, dialogue, and boosts engagement.
Shared media is the best opportunity to interact and make deeper relationships or build trust with people who want to feel closer to their brands.
Paid Media
🗞️ Print as
🪧 Billboards
🔎 Search Engine ads
🚀 Social media advertising, boosted posts
💰 Any media or coverage you pay for
For message and brand consistency, the best practices suggests coordinating with marketing to create advertorials or sponsored content. These paid media pieces are designed to look and feel like editorial content.
By mixing these four media types, you’ll reach people in various places for the best possible engagement outcome.
“Different roads sometimes lead to the same castle.”
Do this now: Take a look at your communications campaigns. Are you using a variety of the media types mentioned above?
Ask yourself:
How well do you understand and use earned media?
Do you want to add any variety to your owned media?
Do you have any shared media campaigns? If not, who can you collaborate with to get one going?
How are your paid media efforts going? Are you tracking results?
Next Time: Speaking of paying, what about influencer marketing? How do you even begin?
Term to Learn
Pay To Play this refers to the practice of paying for placement or coverage in media outlets, publications, or platforms, blurring the lines between traditional earned media and paid media. This practice involves compensating media outlets, influencers, or platforms for the opportunity to showcase a brand, product, or message to their audience. There are serious ethical considerations if someone is promising earned media placement for a fee. To be very clear: if you pay for placement, it is not earned media.
FAQ
Q: If a magazine or podcast says they will give an interview for a fee should I take it?
A: This goes back to our term “pay to play.” You must decide what’s best for you, but know this isn’t public relations—it’s advertising. I don’t recommend it because it blurs the lines between journalism and ads. It may cause more harm than good. Just because you pay for “coverage” doesn’t mean you’ll get any real momentum from it. Buyer beware.
Get PR techniques from recent news.
Newsworthy
The Honey Deuce Cocktail🍹
Strategic marketing and PR campaigns help to make this cocktail the grand slam of this huge tennis event.
Essential Strategy:
Grey Goose capitalizes on cocktail popularity by partnering with event organizers to create limited-edition merchandise.
Grey Goose also teamed up with bartenders to offer the cocktail around the New York area.
An exclusive canned version, available through delivery in New York and Chicago, makes this product even more in demand.
This merch can become a sought-after collectible, extending the moment. Consumers desire unique, collectible items. Since it’s visually attractive, it also makes for highly shareable content.
✍️ Key PR Takeaway: Limited-edition merchandise can help your standout moment go beyond the product itself.
Learn from others.
100% Cute : 0% Cringe
🦛 🛁 Hippo Bath Time.
@dailymail The internet’s favorite hippo, Moo Deng was NOT happy about bath time. 🎥 Newsflare #moodeng #hippo #pygmyhippo #babyanimals #cuteanimals #babyhippo
Moo Deng, which means “bouncy pig,” is a baby pygmy hippo in eastern Thailand that is having a viral moment with her flops and bounces. She isn’t just having a viral animal moment; she’s also become a lifestyle icon.
Brands like Sephora Thailand, New York Mets, and thousands of others have been using her likeness in their social media campaigns.
Key Strategies:
Join in on the fun by commenting.
Make playful post of your own.
Like all viral moments, they tend to go fast… so act fast.
✍️ Key PR Takeaway: Animals, especially babies, quickly grab the attention of internet users. People enjoy cheerful content, especially in contrast to the abundance of negative content online.
Useful PR Resources.
🧰 TOOLKIT
My Favorite Four Free AI Chatbots
AI tools can help speed up daily tasks that traditionally took much longer.
You can use AI to help with research, answering questions, and revising any written content and more.
Important to remember: AI makes mistakes and sometimes ‘hallucinates’, so double-checking is essential, especially when it comes to research.
These are some AI tools I like:
Top 4 Free AI Tools | |
|---|---|
(no account needed) | |
(click 'Use Tools' to add Web Search) | |
(lets you try different AI models like Llama and Mixtral) | |
META AI in WhatsApp | (Use Llama 3 right in WhatsApp) |
Remember, the tool is only as good as it’s instructions.
Here is prompt I’ve used recently:
Act as an expert public relations professional. Find me the person and their contact information from [publication] that is most likely to write about [topic/beat]
Here’s more prompts. If you wondering, I didn’t include Chat GPT because the free version can't browse the internet for real-time information.
💫 Pro Tip: Some journalists will block you if you send an AI-written pitch or press release. That’s why I use AI for research help and spelling/grammar help only.
Attention Seeker of the Week
Clayton
Clayton, a 3-year-old Teddy Poodle is ruler of the roost with his cute face and funny antics. Always willing to supervise construction projects, when he needs a rest from all the work he’s been supervising, he attacks armpits and forces his way in face first. If armpit attack method doesn’t work then it’s a paw to the face until access has been granted.
Many thanks to our reader David S for sharing. We love Clayton too!
Do you want your cute attention seeker featured? Email me your pics!.
Baby Hippos, well baby anything for that matter, is where cuteness resides!
Until next week, keep your shades on and stay cool.
Your fellow Seeker,
Keren
🕶️
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