From Earned to Owned - Content Marketing Rebooted

I was extremely pleased that one of the agencies I work with received an award from The Holmes Report this week, voting them Asia Pacific Digital Consultancy of 2013. In the PR space at least, The Holmes Report awards are very well regarded.

The award was largely a result of the leading-edge digital content studios we have set up across the region to service the content production needs of all the agencies in our group. Content, it would seem, is the new digital currency of the PR industry.

And on the surface this may seem counterintuitive, that a PR firm has won such an accolade for creating content on behalf of its clients. The industry has always been about having other people pass your message on for you. Be they journalists, key opinion leaders, health care professionals, or members of government. It has been about providing others with the information to essentially “create content,” in digital parlance, on your behalf.

So, why, therefore, did we win an award for creating content on behalf of its clients? In short, because PR has changed irreversibly in the past two to three years. The industry is moving into the owned media space in a big way (not away from earned media, this is still vital, being the most credible, trustworthy channel for communications), into the realm of supplementing the earned media message through brand or organizational publishing on their own platforms. On their owned media.

So, what is our angle or claim on this approach versus, say, the marketing department of an organization, that has been building company websites and publishing on its own platforms for quite some time?

In my opinion, the angle is about telling the organization’s story in new, compelling, engaging ways. Maintaining and building reputation by showcasing the many assets of an organization beyond simply selling a product. Telling the stories of an organization’s people, its intellectual property, its history, its news.

Take a simple example, the corporate online newsroom. Brushed off by most marketers as a section of the website where you simply upload press releases, the corporate newsroom rebooted in the post-digital PR world is a rich, engaging, multi-media experience. With videos, motion graphics, and computer-generated imagery telling stories in ways previously the remit of marketing departments and advertising agencies only. Interactive annual reports, infographic-led news dissemination, rich HTML5 news releases, CEO interviews, real-time crisis response platforms. These are the tools of the new PR industry.

In some cases, this owned media platform is completely replacing traditional PR techniques of distributing news via the wires and rolodex of journalistic contacts. Brands and organizations are breaking their own news with Google (or Baidu), Twitter, Facebook, and Weibo; the new wire and traditional media visiting brand’s own sites to pull content directly into their channels.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg for digitally savvy communications professionals. The ability to place your own content in its many forms, syndicated, earned, paid, on other influential platforms, that in turn link back to your owned media, does nothing but propel your own publishing platform up the search rankings.

Watching (and participating in) an industry evolving its model is fascinating. It’s an exciting time to be in PR, for sure.