Leveraging Earned Media for Your Online Campaign
An excellent presentation at last week’s NOI training examined the power of using your online campaign to gin up “earned media” (free media coverage as opposed to paid advertising), with Adam Green of MoveOn and Trevor Fitzgibbon of Fenton Communications looking at ways to create news hooks and to attach your campaign to unfolding stories. Much of what they covered should be familiar to experienced press relations folks, but they did an excellent job of showing ways that an online campaign can fit into a comprehensive press strategy.
Adam Green started things off by looking at WHY campaigns should try to get themselves in the newspaper, on television or in blogs — because it works. Media coverage can give a campaign instant credibility (“I read about you guys just the other day”), can help you reach a new audience, and is free (in money, though it can be VERY expensive in time). In particular, local media attention matters: it’s often easier to get than national coverage, it lets you leverage your local activists and it can lead to much broader distribution of your story if it gets on a newswire (even local blogs can help, since they may be disproportionately read by elected officials and other opinion leaders and can also serve as a source for national blogs — see this article for details).
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3 comments March 13th, 2007 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
