You will be able to sort any channel into owned, earned or paid and say what control and cost each gives you.
Picture a nail technician in Jurong who spent three years building an Instagram account to a few thousand followers. Most of her bookings came from people who saw her work in their feed. Then the app changed what it showed people, and her posts started reaching a fraction of the followers they used to, though her work was as good as ever. She had built her business on a channel she did not control, and she only found out when the control was used.
Every channel you use to reach customers sits in one of three groups. Knowing which group a channel belongs to tells you two things straight away: how much control you have over it, and what it costs you to keep it going.
Owned media is any channel where you decide what appears and who receives it. Your website is owned. So is your email list, and so is a WhatsApp broadcast list made up of customers who saved your number and agreed to hear from you. A printed menu in your shop, a newsletter, the receipts you hand out: all owned.
The cost of owned media is mostly time. A website needs updating, an email list needs something worth sending, and a broadcast list needs messages people are glad to get rather than ones that make them leave. The money cost is usually small, such as a domain, a hosting plan or an email tool.
What you get in return is control. If you have the email addresses of four hundred past customers, you can reach all of them tomorrow morning, and nobody can change the rules on you overnight. Its weakness is reach. Owned media mostly reaches people who already know you. It is excellent for the later stages of the journey from lesson 2.1, retention and advocacy, and weak at finding strangers.
Earned media is attention you did not pay for and cannot directly control. A Google review is earned. So is a mention in a newspaper or a food blog, a parent recommending you in a class group chat, or a stranger sharing your post because they found it funny or useful.
Earned media is the most trusted of the three, because it comes from someone other than you. A parent reading "my daughter's marks went up and she actually likes going" in a review believes it more than the same claim on the centre's own website.
The trade-off is that you can't order it. You can make it more likely: deliver well, ask happy customers for a review at the right moment, make your posts easy to share, give a journalist something worth writing about. But you can't decide when it arrives, what it says, or whether it arrives at all. And earned media can go against you. A one-star review is earned media too.
Paid media is any reach you pay for. Search ads, social media ads, a sponsored post on someone else's account, a fee to an influencer, a flyer drop in letterboxes, a banner at a community event. You pay, and your message appears in front of people who would not otherwise have seen it.
Paid media is the fastest way to reach strangers, and you control the message and the timing. The cost is money, and the reach lasts exactly as long as the money does. When you stop paying, the ads stop. Paid media is good for reaching people early in the journey and for testing which message works, which you will see in lesson 5.3, Email, ads and partnerships compared.
Here is how Mei Ling's home bakery in Punggol, from lesson 1.2, sorts out:
Owned: her WhatsApp catalogue and broadcast list of past customers, and a simple order page. Earned: Google reviews, customers posting photos of her cakes at parties, and word of mouth among parents. Paid: the boosted posts she ran last year, and a stall fee at a weekend market.
Now back to the nail technician at the start. Where does her Instagram account belong?
It feels owned. She set it up, she chooses what to post, and the followers chose to follow her. But the platform decides which of those followers see each post, in what order, and whether a post is shown to strangers at all. It can change how that works at any time without asking, and it can restrict or close an account it believes broke its rules. The same applies to Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn and any other platform you post on.
So treat social media accounts as rented space. You can furnish them and invite people in, but the landlord sets the terms. That doesn't make them bad. A social account can reach many people for no media cost and is often where earned media starts, when people share what you post. It means you should not let a social account be the only place your customers can find you.
The practical habit that follows is to move people from rented space to owned space whenever it makes sense. A follower who also joins your WhatsApp broadcast list or your email list is someone you can still reach if the platform changes its rules. A post that says "message us to join the monthly menu list" turns some rented attention into something you own.
Most small businesses use all three groups without thinking about the balance. When you label each channel, the balance becomes visible. If everything is paid, customers stop arriving the week the budget runs out. If one social account brings in most enquiries, one company's decisions can halve your month. And a strong owned list with nothing paid or earned means you talk to the same people every month and meet few new ones.
In the activity below you will list every channel you use and label each one. When you reach the question of what you would lose if a platform changed its rules tomorrow, give the honest answer, even if the answer is most of your enquiries.
List every channel you use now and label each owned, earned or paid, then note which one you would lose if a platform changed its rules tomorrow.
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