The strategic engine of earned social reach

This is part of WARC’s “The Pace Principle” thought leadership series that makes the case for effective brand building in Asia. WARC subscribers can access the second edition here. Non-WARC subscribers can access a sample report here. Thanks WARC for letting me repost.

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One of the biggest problems with discussing social media strategy is that we cannot help but compare it with advertising strategy, which is to say we mostly look at it through the lens of paid. But social is not just a channel; it is an ecosystem of paid, owned and earned working together, and while we have codified practices for the first and second lever, the third one is not as clear as it should be by now.

What makes earned media a complex lever is that there is not a single part of it you can pull. You need a mix of things worth talking about, and the mechanics of how those things get talked about, which – contrary to popular belief – do not ‘just happen’. We like to believe that if an idea is good enough it will get shared, but in reality there is often a lot of background ‘dark arts’ that trigger shareability.

Just because we have a whole range of new media platforms, techniques and formats to show up in communications, that does not mean the basis on which brand comms work changes. The Law of Double Jeopardy still matters. Category Entry Points still matter. Distinctive Brand Assets still matter. Distinct entertainment still matters. Proper marketing and social media professionals who recognise that evidence and experimentation can co-exist will keep winning in the years to come.

There are two ingredients we need to maximise our odds of earned media (and do not fool yourself, better odds are all you have). The first is around distribution, where you need volume plus value. The second is about what is worth distributing, which I call fodder. You need both to make your earned engine work.

Let us investigate each of them through the lens of a core principle, an example of how other brands do it, and a practical next step.

Volume plus value

The principle

Every time we talk about social media, we inevitably talk about communities. And as we now talk about the rise of algorithmic slop and the retreat to private groups, we are back there again. The common pushback is that communities do not build brands, but it is also hard to ignore the fact that private groups and curated spaces play a role in how brands show up with people. So, what is going on?

Simple: we are looking at a growth engine that combines both value (community engagement) with volume (broad distribution). If we only focus on the first, we do not get the benefits of the laws of brand growth because we are not reaching our light buyers. If we only focus on the latter, we leave money on the table because we might be missing out on a few particularly profitable pockets of the market.

So, knowing how to play the volume and value game is how we win.

An example

Slate, a content creation tool for teams, follows the philosophy of treating their LinkedIn presence less as a single distribution channel and more like an ecosystem. They are not just focusing on growing the Slate account, but on increasing their overall surface area by giving a voice to their employees and leadership, meaning different people can own different themes through their communications.

This allows them, probably on a tight budget, to massively increase their potential reach and frequency while still acknowledging there is a central hub for their communications through their brand profile. They also recognise that it is more important to measure content shareability than just viewability or clickability, because this is how they earn a bit more reach and maximise their potential to reach light buyers, instead of just people who already follow their service.

It also would not surprise me if, off the back of this, they boosted their top performers through paid media, which is how they reach a broader set of light buyers who may or may not be in market right now. This is one way in which you can combine value and volume.

Do this next

Think about how to focus on both high-value activities, through some form of community engagement if you can, but also high-volume distribution, often through paid. They work best when done together.

Fame through fodder

The principle

I have spent 15 years thinking about what communities want and need, and deep down the answer is not glamorous – at least not for marketers. Communities do not organise around a brand or product or even a piece of content per se; they organise around something they love, something they can do together, or something they can talk about. I now describe this simply as fodder: things that spark conversation.

An example

Let us look at Ramp, the B2B payments business. They know that payments are important for businesses, but they also know that, even if a brand like Ramp does have a cult following, people need something more to generate conversation with others. So, to demonstrate the inefficiency of manual expense reporting, they put actor Brian Baumgartner (Kevin from The Office) inside a glass box in New York City to act as their CFO for a six-hour livestream.

By borrowing from streamer culture and inviting influencers to ‘spontaneously’ drop in, they created an event which gave people something actually worth talking about. They could have simply made a content series about the inefficiencies of payments, and that alone would have driven in-platform engagement, but by doing this they created enough fodder (not to mention costly signalling) that made the cultural conversation around it much more substantial.

Fodder is also what clippers and aggregator accounts need to keep feeding their own machines. By helping supply the raw materials through your own communications, you are more likely to create a wide sense that your brand is suddenly being discussed everywhere. In other words, you have just engineered some fame.

Do this next

Do not just think about how to define a relevant message or execute it in a distinct way; think about what kind of fodder you can give people to facilitate conversation. Once you look at the world in this way, all those collaborations and playful product drops (like Cash App’s magic wand) make more sense. They are not bets to grow short-term revenue; they are bets to generate conversation and brand fame.

A two-step earned media engine

Ultimately, what I am talking about here is the ability to stop treating social media and communications strategy as fundamentally different disciplines. We are starting from the perspective of marketing fundamentals, and overlaying the specific grammar and mechanics of what social media allows you to do.

If you combine high-value and high-volume tactics, and give people enough fodder to trigger their own takes, clips and interpretations off the back of it, you will already be ahead of most brands that are trying to generate earned media as if it were a game of luck. The right ideas are essential, but thoughtful distribution is how you stretch them to make your social comms budgets work as hard as they can.