HOW CAN YOU SUCCEED IN THIS ENVIRONMENT?

Success in this new age is largely about embracing a micromedia mindset. If you are open to a new way of thinking about the media environment, you have made the first step toward participating in it. The influence economy has truly arrived, but the main problem is that most are approaching promotion as if boulders of big media and its gatekeepers still ruled the day.

The new media landscape has three types of media—earned media, rented media, and owned media—and you must effectively leverage all three to be successful.

Earned media used to be the only game in town when it came to telling a story or marketing a product. We define earned media as any exposure you get by earning your way onto someone else’s platform or stage. This could range from an NPR interview to an op-ed in the New York Times to an interview on Dave Ramsey’s EntreLeadership podcast to a tweet from Guy Kawasaki. To obtain earned media, you need permission from whoever owns that platform to give you access to their stage, so to speak. When they do so, it’s powerful because not only are you reaching that audience, but you have the implied endorsement of that media outlet as well. The challenge with earned media is that it is extremely difficult to get. You must go through whoever controls the outlet, and you are at the mercy of their decision. Your fate rests in the hands of the gatekeepers who control access to earned media, and it is hard work to capture their attention and ultimately gain access to their stage.

Rented media emerged as a sizeable space with the growth of social media. We define it as a presence and content that you control but that lives on someone else’s platform or stage. Rented media includes your Facebook page, your Twitter account, your LinkedIn profile, your Instagram feed, and so forth. We overloaded that sentence with italics because you don’t ultimately “own” those channels—you’re creating and posting content on a little sliver of real estate owned by someone else. At any time, Facebook can tweak their algorithm, Twitter can shut down your account, LinkedIn can change its rules, and access to your audience on that platform can change forever. This doesn’t mean rented media isn’t incredibly important—we’ll talk plenty about why it is crucial to your success—but it means that to master the new media landscape you can’t be content leaving your audience on someone else’s real estate.

The final category of media is owned media. Understanding and growing owned media is, in our minds, the crux of embracing the micromedia mindset and the key to mastering the new media landscape. We define owned media as any channel where you fully own the connection to your audience, including your website (assuming it lives on a domain you own), your blog (again, assuming it lives on a domain you own) and your email list. Growing an audience that you own gives you leverage when you have a story to tell, a product to sell, or a message that the world needs to hear. It also gives you the ability to shine a spotlight on others who don’t yet have a platform but could benefit your audience.

Put simply, owned media equals ongoing value in this new environment, but utilizing all three kinds of media is a must for a fully integrated strategy. As the figure below shows, each category organically feeds the other but the key to growing your owned media audience is making sure you create a magnet (a call to action) to intentionally and consistently push audiences from earned and rented to owned space.

Each of these three, collectively, add up to define your platform or personal brand. Like nearly everything else in today’s world, your platform will be customized based on your goals, passions, message, and audience.

Are you thinking across each of these buckets?

To succeed, a different approach is needed from both marketers, who should be working with their clients to help them grow their own micromedia platform, and individuals, businesses, and other entities who must embrace the opportunity in front of them to grow an audience that they own the connection to.

Some of you will say, “We have already changed; we’re building meaningful relationships with bloggers and getting excellent coverage. We have a Twitter account and a Facebook page, and we’re getting more active.”

Those are good first steps, but it’s not enough. It’s time to stop chasing access to other people’s platforms and take center stage on your own platform.