April 2025 Part 2: A Minute on Owned Media

A couple of weeks ago in this space, we wrote to introduce to at least some of you a concept called Earned Media, a term used to describe much of what we at Buoyancy PR do – try to interest the media in our author clients and “earn” their attention leading to interviews and coverage. But Earned Media is also more than this, as we will remind you in a moment.

We spoke then about Earned Media being just one category marketers talk about. The other two are Paid Media and Owned Media.

We said we’d come back to this topic. And, as in the earlier article, if you are an experienced marketer, you can stop reading now or read and offer your additional wisdom later.

For many of us, it’s good to think about these things, because promoting your book takes a lot of strategic effort in a lot of areas. The more things you try and places you show up, the better.

The terms themselves are not new, they are ones I learned in the dark ages of the pre-digital world. The definitions were a little different then, though.

Many of you reading this start like I do from that era, remembering newspapers, radio, TV, and magazines. Continuing the refresher, in earlier days, Earned Media meant the news media decided to cover you at an event, write a story or review of your book or play, or interview you if you had been successful at capturing their attention. You had “earned” their attention, so to speak. You didn’t pay for the resulting airtime or article space, though since you may obtain this with PR help, you were likely paying the PR person who brings his or her expertise to the process to aid its success.

But the independence of the news media deciding to do a story on you, your book, business or ministry gives their coverage an authority and authenticity. Plus, those media outlets often have tens of thousands of listeners or watchers, and one interview by them can really boost people’s awareness of you.

In the digital, highly social media-driven world of today, Earned Media still includes the traditional media, sometimes called legacy media, but now also includes the powerful consumer and reader reviews upon which we all rely, as well as other social media mentions that become basically digital word of mouth.

Earned Media of this type is powerful because people trust recommendations from people they know, and these review sites have become enormously successful.

So that’s Earned Media.

Let’s take a minute now to look at another category of media, Owned Media.

What is that?

In a pre-digital era, Owned Media (although not a description my journalism and PR courses used, however) for a corporation would have included company newsletters, annual reports and brochures (and we also included company bulletin boards, back in the dark ages of employee communication).

So, what is Owned Media now?

It’s somewhat self-explanatory.  According to an article on the Harvard Business School online site, “Owned media is digital content your company (or you) creates, including its website, blog, emails and social media posts.”

I would gently argue that Owned Media is any marketing content you create, digital or not.

Many authors may immediately think about their social media accounts. They are aware of people who know about them and follow them through these avenues.

But a reminder. We don’t own those accounts. We’ve seen wobbles on these platforms, when some folks make other folks who own those social platforms unhappy, and they take down their accounts. You do own your posts that you wrote, and assuming you have a scheduled program and have copies of those posts, they are yours to use in other places.

I generally recommend to author clients of mine that they do create a website, and that they make the concept and branding about them as an author or about their ministry, not only about their first book, though I do understand it’s hard to see beyond that first book when one is in the midst of writing and publishing it. That will serve them and their readers better and allow for a logical extension and expression of their ideas.

Usually if someone does decide to blog, that gets posted to the website as well.

So, what else is considered owned media these days? Podcasts? Newsletters created on Substack?

The way the world changes seemingly overnight, by tomorrow there could be even more options.

Back to that non-digital reference, one could even argue that the flyers you create for a book signing event or anything else that communicates to other people about you and what you are doing, is your Owned Media.

You may be thinking this is kind of ho-hum in the life of a new author. But it’s a concept and definition worth knowing about.

And after all, what you are reading now is part of Buoyancy PR’s own Owned Media.

That same Harvard Business School site article also referenced a survey reporting marketers say 24 percent of their digital marketing budget is spent on Earned Media, 25 percent on Paid Media, but the largest percentage, 32 percent, on their Owned Media. That survey was conducted by a public relations software company called Cision, which is a familiar company to Buoyancy as it is the database to which we subscribe and is the source for us for one important part of our media lists.

We think there’s more to discuss on these three categories of media and how they might help you promote your books. We will get back to Paid Media before too long,