How Does Earned Media Value Work?

Earned Media Value is an established standard for measuring the impact of word-of-mouth. Learn more about how it is calculated.

Michael Faliero avatar
Written by Michael Faliero
Updated over a week ago

Companies have always expended effort to generate press through social means, even prior to the advent of social networks—drumming up excitement through word-of-mouth or recruiting trendsetters to generate buzz. As a form of advertising-yet-not-quite advertising, there have been attempts to quantify the worth of this admittedly subjective task. Earned Media Value is the accepted advertising industry standard for converting this kind of press to a dollar amount that can be assigned value.

In the social media and employee advocacy industry, products like Clearview Social measure Earned Media Value (hereafter EMV) as what it would have cost to have purchased the same amount of media reach through traditional advertising costs.

In the simplest possible example, if you were to author a new blog post and begin sending traffic to it via a purchase of LinkedIn paid placement, Google search keywords, or a promoted Tweet, you might select some parameters defining your target audience—say, users interested in Bankruptcy Legal News—and then set a bid of $13.78* per successful referral to your site. Now, say you also give your blog post to your friend Emma, who shares it and five of her friends read your insightful article—that is $68.90 you did not have to spend out of your advertising campaign to get those eyeballs.

This sounds good, but the truth is even better—Earned Media is viewed as inherently more trustworthy than purchased media. When a click in a conventional LinkedIn ad buy might cost $5, Clearview Social will attribute that same click $5 of worth in EMV, but that doesn't include the intangible value that the Clearview click came organically from somebody a human knows and trusts, whereas the ad buy click said "Sponsored" all over it.

(On the right, how a piece of content promoting your organization, in this case a fictitious "5 Counsel Tips You Can't Miss" piece, might appear through a traditional advertising buy. On the left, how much more inviting and genuine the same piece of content might appear shared by a trusted connection a customer knows from their network.)

Earned Media Value is simply the best way available to quantify the financial impact of Clearview Social on your marketing efforts. At the time this article was authored, the average Queue sent through Clearview Social generated the equivalent of $138.50 in traffic for its organization. Many larger firms see even bigger gains.

Tailoring EMV To Your Industry

Not all Internet eyeballs are equally valuable; the worth assigned to a view of your firm's content varies based on your industry. The amount of profit possible from somebody who came to your site looking for "ACA Compliance" is greater than somebody who arrived looking for "Taylor Swift MP3's". Clearview Social is the only social advocacy platform that lets you assign EMV to your articles based on their content to differentiate this fact.

When building a queue, add as many descriptors of the traffic as you like in the Keywords box under the article. Many common fields of practice among Clearview users are already included, but you may add any number of your own as well. Once you type your own keywords, if they are recognized as a field that has current pricing data, they'll light up blue.

In the above example, Clearview Social was able to pull up-to-the-minute pricing data for San Fransisco and Boise.

If you don't add any keywords at all, we'll use the LinkedIn default value for an advertising campaign that is completely untargeted, which hovers in the $5.17 range. This may change based on a number of different factors.

* Actual current market value of Bankruptcy Legal News traffic at the time this article was authored.

We have prepared a video on this topic for your consideration:

Any Further Questions?

If there is anything else we can assist you with, you can contact Clearview Social Support either by emailing support@clearviewsocial.com or through the Intercom chat button in the bottom right of the site.

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