Earned Media - Part II

Acquiring Customers - Owned & Earned Media

Let's continue upon the previous article and learn about the next points of earned media: managing the risks involved and measuring the effectiveness.

Managing

So far, we have discussed how monitoring and participating helps companies leverage their earned media channels towards achieving their marketing goals. And we have shown how earned media can be a powerful digital marketing tool.

While earned media can be powerful when consumers share positive things about your brand, it can be just as powerful when they share negative comments. Even if 99% of your customers are happy, a single customer can potentially create a nightmare for you.

United Airlines faced such a situation in 2009. One of its passengers, a musician named Dave Carroll, found his guitar was damaged during a United Airlines flight. He called United Airlines several times to complain and get reimbursement for his broken guitar but got no satisfactory response from the company. After several months of frustration, he wrote and performed a song called United Breaks Guitars and posted it on YouTube.

Within days, the song went viral and was watched by millions of people. It created such bad press for United Airlines that even its stock price took a hit soon after the video was released. The effect was so powerful that the company decided to use this video in its employee training program.

One of the best defenses against such negative reactions is having strong brand advocates. OOFOS is fortunate that many of its followers will come to the brand's defense, as Darren now explains.

We have an audience that follows us currently who they look to those channels to see what's the latest and greatest. But they're not of a demographic that looks to those channels for engagement, community, and feedback and less likely negative because they're having a customer care problem, et cetera.

What I will say is they are also very defensive of the brand. And so if somebody comes with something negative, that is the one time you will see our customers engage in social media and come to the defense of the brand and say no, that hasn’t been my experience. I’ve actually had a great experience. You should give it another try.

But they aren't there to try and be quick-witted or fun or engage. And honestly, that's difficult on the platforms because the platforms like engagement, and the platforms will favor engagement.

Earned media can be really good for a brand because it helps break you outside the confines of your own audience, but earned media can also be incredibly detrimental to a brand, and not just because you can get negative coverage, but because it can actually portray a marketplace that doesn't truly exist.

A perfect example of this is you might get a great hit that talks about OOFOS, talks about premium proprietary technology, talks about all the people affiliated with the brand, and at the end of the day, they link to Amazon for a price half your suggested retail price out in the marketplace because you have a singular seller on Amazon who is selling one-off product that might even be used, isn't backed by a warranty, and they’re selling it for 50% off of what you typically sell your product for.

What that's going to do is it's going to frame your product in the mind of the consumer at a certain price point that truly doesn't exist. And so those things hurt the brand. We work really hard to ensure that when we are driving media that is being earned out in the marketplace, they try and tell the truth about the brand, the product, the pricing where it sits in the market, but the reality is you don't have control over that.

As good as earned media can be for a brand, it can be tough. It can be difficult, and it can even be harmful. Aside from the potential pitfalls of backlinks and pricing models on earned media, I'd say earned media can be very difficult to get the full and true story across because third-party outlets are never going to say exactly what you'd hope they'd say.

There's got to be a level of understanding that they're going to tell the story in the narrative that they are taking away from the brand. I personally think there's some value in that. There's value in understanding how others are perceiving the brand. But the difficulty there is that their perception is going to be pushed on millions of other people.

We would love for every article to talk about all three of our pillars. We'd love them to talk about the active "recovery" category. We'd love them to say that we're the pioneer there. We'd love them to say that it's because we have this crazy, unique foam technology, and we'd love them to use some of our validators, whether that be our brand partners or medical experts, to talk about the space.

The reality is that's never really going to happen. So earned media is always presenting a piece of the story, never the full story. And that can be challenging. That's why we push our team to try and get more in-depth strategic articles written about the brand that can go deeper and at least touch on as many of those pillars as possible.

The example of e.l.f. has shown that companies can sometimes engineer virality with great success. But in some instances, such efforts can backfire. Maggie Malek refers to two examples of brands that pushed for a viral moment, and ended up with poor results:

  • In 2009, Skittles redirected the homepage of its website to a display of Twitter feeds that mentioned Skittles. Some people began posting crude messages and links to pornographic material tagged with #Skittles.
  • In 2013, an automated customer service bot on Bank of America’s Twitter responded to a tweet reporting on an Occupy Wall Street protest of Bank of America. The bot tried to offer customer service help to the protesters, who used it to amplify their own message.

What we coach brands, though, on is you've seen in the past, brands will want to create a landing page where people can upload user-generated content. Then the bad, hilarious people on the internet take over that website. It becomes awful for the brand.

It's happened, unfortunately, to Bank of America and Skittles. You can Google those examples. We never coach brands to do those types of campaigns because you are just giving up too much control, and you're opening yourself up to risk.

But you definitely do have to have a crisis policy. I will say that is where MMI does coach brands more to stop stressing out about being a viral moment or creating a cultural moment, because I feel like those are the ones that always kind of go south online, is when a brand tries to be edgy or tries to be cultural or tries to be that viral.

And I think when you authentically, as a brand, try to be there for your consumers, that actually takes a lot of the risk out of it.

Brands no longer have complete control over their message. Consumers have the liberty to share their views about brands on social media, and these positive or negative views can get amplified and even go viral. While positive comments can strengthen a brand, negative reviews can be quite damaging, as we saw in several previous examples.

Even though it is hard to predict when you might have a social media crisis at hand, every brand should be prepared for such a crisis and have a game plan to manage it. One of the best ways to manage a social media crisis is to learn from the way that forest fires are managed. Like social media crises, it is hard to predict exactly when and where a forest may catch fire.

Firefighters have two basic principles to manage forest fires. First, make sure that the forest is not dry so it is not prone to igniting. And, second, if it does ignite, act quickly before the fire spreads. We can apply this analogy to social media crises. The first part to prevent a potential fire is to ensure that you don't have a dry forest.

In other words, you should be aware of and seek to remedy any inherent problems in your company's product or service. When Dave Carroll complained with United Airlines, it resonated with thousands of customers who had experienced similar frustration with United. In other words, United Airlines' forest was dry. We live in a transparent world, where it is difficult for companies to hide from consumers. So it is the responsibility of companies to anticipate and avoid these disasters before they happen.

Continuing with the analogy, sometimes fires do happen. When social media crises strike, the key, as with a fire, is to act quickly before damage spreads. One study found that 42% of customers expect a response to their complaints on social media within an hour. Another study found that 80% of customers expect a response within 24 hours. Almost 50% of customers claim that they would stop doing business with a firm if it does not respond to their social media complaints. And these complaints negatively influence 62% of customers.

In short, disasters can happen, which is why it is so essential to be prepared. So far, we have discussed how to monitor, participate in, leverage, and manage earned media. Next, we will discuss how marketers can measure it.

Measuring

Earlier, Darren Brown mentioned that measuring the effectiveness of earned media can be difficult, and this is often the case for many marketers. What metrics have you observed, or could you imagine brands using, to measure the impact of earned media?

It can be difficult to measure the impact of earned media conversations on sales for at least two reasons. One challenge is known as self-selection. Typically, users who either love or hate your product are likely to be vocal on social media, but there is a silent majority who may not share the views of this vocal minority.

For example, heavy users of Diet Coke are more likely to like the Diet Coke Facebook page. This does not mean that those likes cause these consumers to increase their consumption of Diet Coke. In fact, the causality could be going in the other direction.

Another challenge is homophily, which means that people with similar preferences tend to belong to the same groups. This makes it difficult to trace causation. For instance, imagine you post on your Facebook page that you just bought a new novel by your favorite author. And the next day, your friend posts that she just bought that novel. Was your friend influenced by your purchase, or would she have bought the book anyway, as she already happens to be a fan of the same author, too?

In other words, it's hard to separate correlation from causation. Because of these challenges, most companies measure earned media using metrics such as number of views, shares, et cetera, rather than sales. Companies often convert these metrics into an amount of money they would have to spend to expose an equivalent number of customers to their messages via paid media.

When it comes to measuring the impact and reach of earned media, the bias from self-selection and homophily can inflate the effectiveness of earned media.

Next, Tarang Amin discusses how e.l.f. measures its marketing plan, including earned media. Note that Tarang refers to “Earned Media Value,” by which he means the value of impressions that the company got for free.

So when we look at TikTok, we often look at the number of user-generated videos, the level of engagement we're getting in terms of views. When we look at Twitch, we have a number of metrics in each of those.

Other sub-metrics we look at include Google search results in terms of organic search as a leading indicator of where our consumers are spending their time. How many people are coming back? What are retention rates? How many beauty squad loyalty members do we have? What are our organic search results on Google? What is earned media value?

I mean, there's a series of metrics that we take a look at. And I would say they're all looked at holistically. Earned media value, not a great measure, does measure activity amongst influencers and the amount of buzz that you're generating there.

So there are quite a few different metrics we look at, but I'd say the overall objective quite simply is, are we building the brand and are we building engagement with our community in a way that drives sales?

Let’s learn from Darren Brown how OOFOS tries to measure its earned media.

We work with some outside agencies to track all earned media that comes across, so any mention of the OOFOS brand, positive or negative, how many impressions it would garner based on the reach of the outlet. And then we internally do a little bit of a digest of how strong we felt that article was.

One of our KPIs for the PR space is to ensure that we are hitting a minimum number of what we'd call strong article hits, which talks about one of those key pillars. We can associate trends with key hits. We can see increases in brand search, and we can see when our retailers have an increase in that wants-need following, a hit in a mainstream news outlet, where you're getting in front of eyeballs outside of your own environment and sphere, and there's a tangible result that you know is happening.

But typically, they're just trends and correlations. You can't specifically tie it back to causation, unless there's a digital trail. Where it becomes easy is when we have a digital trail of something that links to OOFOS.com, and we can say, hey, we got a great hit in Fast Company. And we saw that they ran a report on the return of clogs in the trend space. And we saw a 30% lift in clog sales for a week and a half following. That you can measure.

It's never typically big enough for you to say this was a meaningfully impactful business-moving drive. But as we continue to measure awareness year over year, as we continue to take the temperature of our retail partners in the space and see what's moving at the product level, and as we continue to look at the number of impressions that we can serve through those earned media spots, we can see whether there's benefit being received on the back end.

I do want to caveat, impressions are incredibly fool's gold. I would not hang a business on impressions and how many you can earn because the value of the impression is definitely not something that's currently being measured in marketing quite as well as it should be. It's something we strive to try and do on a gut level here at OOFOS, which is, OK, we got a call-out in Yahoo News, but we were the fifty-third slide on a list of eighty-six best slides for the summer. Did that really do anything for us? Yes, it's going to read like we got a couple million impressions from Yahoo News off of that.

But really, how many people truly saw it? And even those that saw it, how many took in the message, the brand, or anything about it? Likely, very little. Whereas if we can get a dedicated article in space talking about the three pillars of our content creation strategy, which are the messages that we want to communicate—so talking about one of our partners and movers, talking about our technology, talking about the active "recovery" category—we put a lot more weight in those, even if they come in smaller outlets that don't have quite as much reach.

For earned media metrics, Darren stresses quality over quantity. OOFOS measures the quality of an article that mentions the company before counting it, to ensure that it is representing the company in a way that will be beneficial to it and that is in line with its marketing plan.

Darren also underscores the difficulty of establishing clear quantifiable metrics for earned media when he admits that OOFOS relies heavily on “trends and correlations.”

Darren is hesitant to rely too heavily on “impressions” as a useful metric. As we’ve discovered with Facebook “likes,” impressions do not deliver a clear view of actual marketing value.

We now know that measuring the impact of earned media on sales presents several challenges. While digital media presents us with many metrics we didn’t have before—such as views, likes, and impressions—it can be difficult to calculate the impact of these metrics on sales. For many companies, the goal of earned media is not necessarily short-term impact on sales, but to enhance customer engagement and build brands that will have an impact in the long run.

Next, we’ll explore another way that companies can acquire customers and build brand loyalty that blurs the lines between earned, owned, and paid media: influencer marketing.