Many of you may be familiar with the Paid, Owned and Earned model of media. The concept is that Paid Media is traditional and digital advertising, the Owned Media is your owned assets (websites, Facebook Page, etc), and Earned Media is the digital word-of-mouth you received (Facebook posts, Tweets by someone other than the brand, blog posts that weren’t sponsored, etc).
This was mainly done to help marketers understand social media and how it fits in with the current model of traditional advertising (both digital and non-digital). Well, this model will be disappearing in the near future.
All these sections are combining and the dividing line between them is becoming more gray. Where does a Sponsored Post from Facebook fall? How about a paid media campaign that is executing a social strategy? Things are getting to hard to categorize and that’s a good thing. The end of the day this chart and many like it were made to help us transition to the future. The fact is that social is weaved into all other marketing channels and in the future we won’t call it social media marketing or require a plan to generate earned media. We’ll just call it marketing because earned media is the ultimate goal from all of the channels.
