RELYING TOO MUCH ON ANY ONE FORM OF MEDIA

We’re going to explore each of these three categories in detail in the coming chapters because we believe all three are incredibly important to you, and you need to have a clear roadmap for how to use each. As a general rule, you want to move people from earned and rented media to owned media. When you are reaching an audience via earned or rented media, you don’t ultimately control how long you get to reach that audience or how often your posts will show up.

Let’s take a look at Facebook’s 2013 algorithm change as an example. For years Facebook worked to court brands around the world to start fan pages on the popular social network. Through official brand pages, companies, celebrities, and other public entities could build an audience consisting of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of “likes” from fans. In allowing these brand pages, Facebook granted permission to each brand to set up shop on its stage—the largest in the world—and build their own section of the audience. This was seen as a huge boon for brands, and it was. But the wake-up call sounded for many in December 2013 when Facebook changed its News Feed algorithm, and the result was far less organic exposure for brands. According to an analysis of brand pages done by Ignite Social Media, in the week after the change was made, “organic reach and organic reach percentage [had] each declined by 44 percent on average, with some pages seeing declines as high as 88 percent.”

In a single big move, Facebook elbowed brands that had spent years building large audiences on the site away from prime real estate on its stage, removing access to a large percentage of the amassed audience. It was a reality check for a number of top brands that started to recognize the importance of owning the connection with their audience on their own real estate rather than leaving that audience in a place they didn’t control in rented space.

It’s important to understand that a heavy reliance on earned and rented media is a potential problem not just for brands but also for individuals.

This is a common misconception for those who believe it is okay to house their entire audience on someone else’s real estate. For example, let’s say you are a popular drive-time radio host in Houston, and you reach 75,000 people every weekday afternoon. That seems like an awesome platform, doesn’t it? And it is—but the problem is that each time you’re on the air, you’re talking to an audience that you don’t own, and you are doing it in someone else’s auditorium. The ability to reach that audience daily is a great thing, but you must realize that every time you go on the air, you are on borrowed time. The moment that radio station sells to Clear Channel or your ratings slip and a syndicated show replaces you, you are pulled off the stage and sent back to your own auditorium. If you haven’t been intentionally driving people to your auditorium, via real estate that you either rent (Twitter, Face-book, LinkedIn) or, even better, own, you have missed a huge opportunity. Once you are off the air of that Houston station, it may be hard for your audience to find you unless you created the path for them to follow while you still sat in that studio.

This same rule applies to thought leaders who blog for a top online publication like Inc., Fast Company, the Huffington Post, or any other popular publication. It’s awesome that you get to reach millions of people from Inc.com’s stage, but you must be fully aware that you’re speaking from a stage you don’t own, and at any moment your ability to stand there could be revoked. To safeguard yourself, write each column with two things in mind:

Entertaining/informing your audience

Giving that audience a call to action that drives them back to your website/blog to access a free value item (an assessment, a quiz, a download, etc.)

Your goal anytime you access an audience via earned media is to convert as many of those people as possible into personal followers. Encourage them to follow you out the door of Inc.com’s auditorium to your own. With each year that you do this, you will grow your audience significantly and give yourself huge personal leverage. Without that last step of converting the audience, you’re leaving the value of all that hard work with the media outlet that hosted you. Put audience conversion at the top of your goal list when contributing or appearing as a guest.