The earned versus paid media debate has long bee an issue in marketing agencies and communications departments. Social media has continued to complicate this issue. For B2B companies I would argue that having a balance of both paid and earned media is an important component in a successful marketing mix.

I have found that marketers that are not familiar with the social web web have difficulty determining paid versus earned media.

How is a paid search advertisement different from from a retweet on Twitter. These are the types of questions B2B marketers need to be able to understand and to answer in order to make the correct decisions about online earned and paid media.

Example Earned Media Word-Of Mouth: You tweet a link to a web page on Twitter for your site, and someone else retweets that message to their followers. The result is new people discovery your web site through a method that had no cost other than the investment in creating the web page and to type 140 characters.

This is earned B2B social media. The person that retweets your link could also say that your site/product is bad. You do not have control over what people say about your content.

It is a different situation with paid media. If you are paying for placement of banner ads or search keywords, your control everything, including the placement, the wording, etc. Sure there is gray area in the online earned versus paid media battle. If you give a blogger a product for review and they write a review is that paid or earned? I believe that it is a paid media mention even though it is not a traditional online ad.

6 Benefits Of Online Earned Media For B2B
Earned media in the form of public relations has had many benefits traditionally, but when earned media happens on the web a new set of positive results are achieved.

1. Mappable Word-Of-Mouth – While paid media can create word-of-mouth, earned media on the social web can generate a higher quality of word-of-mouth in many cases. The issue with offline word-of-mouth has been that it is difficult to measure. The social web helps with this problem, because conversations on the web can be seen and measured.

2. Conversions – Social media sells. Earned media often means a higher conversion rate versus paid media. As Paul mentions in his post direct marketing is in decline and inbound marketing shows improved conversion rates. Earned media in the form of B2B social media is the foundation of successful inbound marketing.

3. Search Traffic – Offline word of mouth is great. In fact, 95% of word-of-mouth happens offline, however, online word-of-mouth normally means the spread of ideas through links. While the direct benefit of this is people finding out about your company or product, a huge secondary benefit is improved organic search ranking. Improved search ranking provides a secondary source of traffic and thus can result in increased leads.

4. Opt-in – Offline word-of-mouth can lead people to buy and so can online. However, online word-of-mouth facilitates a secondary level of transactions that may not be purchases, but could lead to future purchases. Word-of-mouth online from social media can increase follower on social networks, subscribers on e-mail lists and other types of opt-in actions.

5. Traditional Media Influence – Traditional media still have a lot of reach, especially in many B2B industries. Media use the web to research stories and find new sources.

6. Permanence – Offline conversations fad away fast. Online conversations last. They are permanent. Sure, topics on the web shift quickly, but the actual dialogue is always there and available to someone else for discovery. Permanence is powerful and is a result that paid media can’t provide. Once an advertising contract is over, the banner ad comes down and the next one goes up.

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