Of the three horses in a brand’s marketing troika: owned, paid and earned – earned media is the least understood and least utilized, despite the fact that a conscious effort to leverage the channel can be extremely effective and long lasting.

At Kluge we emphasize the importance of building out an overarching digital strategy so that all three media channels can be utilized. While the time and investment required to build these assets may seem extensive, the benefits they can reap are significant. However, they do require a constant vigil, particularly in regards to earned media.

In his blog, Sean Corcoran  describes the characteristics of earned media as having “evolved into the transparent and permanent word-of-mouth that is being created through social media.”

The virtues of earned media were recently highlighted at a panel hosted by Paul Bricault of Amplify and moderated by Ira Rubenstein, Executive VP of Media Marketing at Sony Pictures, as part of Amplify’s Mentor Series.

Amplify mentor panelist Ann Glenn, Director of Social Media Marketing at Sony Pictures Interactive, pointed to Nabisco’s response to the black out at the Super Bowl as an example of a well crafted “Earned Media” strategy.

Nabisco’s popular Oreo Cookie featured a humorous commercial during the regular broadcast of the Super Bowl. The ad depicted an out of control brawl in a public library between people who favor the cream battling those who favor the cookie. This argument is still being debated on Oreo’s website and social media outlets to this day, illustrating the careful cross channel strategy Oreo’s marketing agency, 360i had mapped out long before the Super Bowl commercial had aired.

360i’s foresight extended to its social media team the agency assembled to tweet while they were watching the Super Bowl. What football insights the Oreo team could offer might have been in question when the game commenced, but when the lights blacked out at the start of the third quarter, the light bulb went on for 360i crew.

“Power Out? No Problem….You can still dunk in the dark.”

The cheeky and real time message was re-tweeted over 14,000 times, and has kept the Oreo image ricocheting around the “Twitter Town Square” to this day. A 30 second “paid media” ad on the Super Bowl cost $3.8 million while the subsequent twilight tweet-fest cost Nabisco virtually nothing.

Regardless of how clever the tweet, nobody would be talking about it today if Oreo had not taken the time and effort to build up their followers on Twitter or taken into consideration the play between all their media channels when building out a campaign.

Earned media in today’s digital age can punish you just as quickly as it rewarded Nabisco, as the folks at Dominos Pizza can attest. In 2009, two rogue employees filmed themselves spitting on pies and sticking cheese up their nose before placing it on the doughy pizzas. They uploaded the distasteful scene on YouTube where over a million views were registered before it caught the attention of management 48 hours after the videos went live.

The prevalence of social media and the 24/7 tweet cycle is only going to strengthen as the millennium unfolds, ushering in what will be the golden age of earned media and real time marketing. The social genie is well and truly out of the bottle and brands who ignore its impact will do so at their own peril. The brands who embrace the trend and encourage their fans to engage in an on-going dialog will strengthen the ties to their community and allow the conversation to continue ad infinitum 24/7, or so my friend, Ann Glenn tells me.