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September 18, 2012

Communications Convergence

George Wiedemann

The pace of change brought on by digital, social and mobile is so rapid we all feel that something very fundamental is changing in marketing.  It is. Marketing focus and spend follow eyeballs.  Increasingly eyeballs are spending more time away from traditional media.  A little technology is now added in to the new digital spaces.  This mixture is now producing something which the Fast Company article (an excerpt below) identifies as the convergence of paid, owned and earned media.  It smacks of the power of “big data” driving automation to allow marketers…at low cost…to focus their most effective messages.  The sun makes heat.  Through a magnifying glass it makes fire.

What Businesses Can Learn From Romney’s $120,000 Twitter Splurge

By Ryan Holmes

From Fast Company Magazine September 18, 2012

“Paid media includes TV spots, billboards, digital banner ads, etc. that a company pays for to get the word out. Owned media consists of a business’ own resources: websites, newsletters, and social media presence. Earned media is a potent mix of word of mouth, news stories, user reviews, and social media mentions.

Social ads like Promoted Tweets and Sponsored Stories bring these different media channels together in brand new, highly coordinated ways. Tweets and Facebook posts, for instance, are generally born as owned media--hatched by in-house marketing or community teams. In the past, these updates were blasted out by businesses with minimal follow-up or analysis. Technology, however, has caught up.

Social media management suites now enable monitoring the lifecycle of social messages in intimate detail, tracking everything from retweets, Likes and mentions to click-throughs and on-site conversions. At minimal cost, in other words, brands can field test which of their messages resonate with their audience and which fall flat, backing that up with hard data.

This is where convergence enters the picture. When a message proves a winner, its reach can be amplified--instantly--by tapping into the new breed of paid social ads. The idea is to “double and triple down on content that’s resonating to reach a broader audience,” explains social business analyst Jeremiah Owyang.”