As social media continues to make it easier for consumers to communicate with one another and share experiences and information, companies are changing their marketing priorities to line up with the trends and greatest impact.  We now see companies focusing on Owned Media, Earned Media, and Paid Media in that order.

Forrester defined these three types of media in this blog post last month and you’ll start to hear this more and more as you attend various marketing conferences and strategy sessions.

The first priority for companies with a strong strategy in place will be to build a consistent base with their owned media such as their web site, blog, Twitter account, Facebook account, and newsletter.  Consumers will choose how they want to interact with a company, if at all, and having a presence in these areas builds a solar system that allows your company to be engaged regardless of the channel.

As your company builds its presence and successfully interacts with customers and prospects, the goal is to build that positive word-of-mouth into earned media.  It’s important to note that while earned media is something that will likely be tracked by your Marketing team, it has less to do with marketing and much more to do with the quality of your service or product and the sales and support experience your customers and prospects have with your company and your web site.  Make sure that the task force responsible for earned media is made up of the right people from the groups that have the ability to impact it such as Product Management, Support, Sales, and your web site team.

Last but not least is advertising, i.e. paid media.  While advertising is on a drastic downturn as consumers and prospects train themselves and use technology to ignore it, it is not going away.  Paid media is still a powerful way to ignite a marketing campaign actually being carried out via your owned media.  Many companies have used paid media as a catalyst for a larger online or social media campaign to do things such as naming a new product or submitting a short video to be the next commercial or idea for the company with wild success.  That said, advertising is becoming more valuable as a catalyst and not a foundation as it once was.

As social media and technology continue to impact how we all interact, advertising and other interruptive forms of marketing will continue to move to the bottom of the marketing to-do list and play a more supportive role in a company’s marketing strategy.