Generate Credible Buzz for an Organization

Tips on How to Evaluate Earned Media

What is Earned Media?

Earned media is defined as “the content and conversation around [the organization’s] brand or product that has been created by somebody else and published somewhere other than [the organization’s] owned channels.”

This definition includes news publications, social media mentions, blog posts, etc. Earned media is valuable because it carries more credibility than owned or paid media.

Creating a Measurement Strategy

Depending on the brand, earned media goals range from quality-over-quantity to more-mentions-more-money. Electronics brands might value business/economic mentions over local publications. If a company is looking to specify its goals for earned media, there are some guiding questions to answer. Key performance indicators change for each campaign, so it is important to reevaluate the measurement strategy. Even though KPIs might change, it is recommended to keep results from one campaign in order to compare new results to past campaigns.

Earned Media in Action

Apple’s press release from the middle of January resulted in earned media from broadcast, print, and radio media.

News sources like Newsweek, ABC, CNBC, and Washington Post are some of the ones that covered Apple’s expansion.

Tracking Earned Media

Some of the common ways of tracking earned media include: looking at the number of social media shares an article received, mentions in third party media, publication of the articles on other blogs or websites. There are also a lot of metric-tracking websites, like TrendKite, that will do it with a few clicks.

Evaluating Earned Media

The Earned Media Calculation multiplies each clip by two to four times the advertising rate for that media outlet.

This amount gives the client an idea of how much earned media they generated. However, if a client pays $5,000 in hopes of seeing a return of $20,000 EMV, it needs to be a newsworthy story.

Should there be a new way to track earned media?

According to a writer for Cision, there should be a new way to track earned media. The common method, Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE), is not sufficient because it is “impression-agnostic”. AVE does not distinguish between good and bad mentions, therefore making it difficult to tell if the earned media for that story/brand is something to be truly excited about.