The Engaged Consumer

Almost anyone who knows anything about interfacing with customers or prospective customers through the Networks (Facebook, Twitter, et al.) will tell you that you should start by listening.

So most marketers' first step is to set up a monitoring tool (maybe expensive, maybe as simple as a free keyword search on Twitter). Then, the first experience that almost every media marketer (or marketer, period) has after listening to the Networks for a bit is that the brand, product, or company they are representing will be mentioned. When this happens (“just bought a Honda at Carmax, great experience!”), it will make a positive and socially important impression on everyone who views it. This is exciting because it is essentially a free media placement, a nugget of gold dropped into people's news or Twitter feeds that didn’t cost you anything! This type of mention is often called “earned media,” earned because your company created a great customer experience that made someone tell their friends.

The excited marketer who has just read a positive mention will often jump right to, “How do I make more of that happen?,” or “How can I make that person talk more about it, more often?” The sad reality is, you can’t, or you shouldn't try. The critical thing about the Conversation Stream from a media pro’s perspective is that while you can participate if you want, there is no media plan for earned media.

Featuring earned media in your traditional media is a good idea, but it's still you talking at the base of it, not your customers. And spending money to get people to blog or mention you (i.e. free food for becoming a fan on Facebook) rings hollow in the social space. You have to disclose your investment (not doing so is a surefire way to Social and now, Legal Doom). The minute you do that, people tune out in a very subtle but profound way.

The only truism related to earned media is that you should create a great experience for your customers that they will want to talk about, and then hope that they do (I call this the Zappos Way). This is all fine and good, but the customer experience is the department of product managers, interaction designers, and customer service personnel. These folks have very real tactical reasons to react to mentions.

However, the job of the media professional is to be proactive, to be the engineers of brand success by connecting marketplace to product or brand experience in a powerful way, grabbing attention and creating engagement out of nothing. Measuring earned media is a great way to see how you’re doing (you should listen for that purpose), but sitting back and hoping to earn earned media isn’t a marketing strategy.

So what's a media marketer to do? What's your perspective? I'd love to hear in the comments. I'll lend mine in my next post, "Becoming a Hydroelectric Engineer," due later this week.