Abstract: Earned media is a subset of social branding wherein companies try hard to get favorable publicity through promotional efforts rather than paid advertisements. According to a study by Nielsen, 92% of consumers around the world mentioned that they trust earned media such as word of mouth and recommendations from family and friends.

Earned Media

Online consumer reviews came in as the second most trusted form of advertising. The user stories published on social media with their own experience and recommendation is one form of earned media. The “likes” on social media sites and comments posted against a specific news feed or blog can also be regarded as earned media outcomes.

Omnibus researched that 68% of Facebook users are “more likely to buy” based on an earned media recommendation from a friend, thus emphasizing the power of earned media.

Frictionless Sharing

The transparent sharing of resources using social media services is known as Frictionless sharing. It is a passive service that allows applications to automatically share your activity to a wide and unlimited number of entities and locations, as you visit different websites. This means that all you need to do is look at a particular piece of content, such as a news item, story or video, and that piece of content is linked to your social profile.

We all have been frictionless sharing with advertisers, social media companies, big data miners, and search engines for a decade. While people are voicing their concerns over the privacy-invading frictionless sharing, the social netizens have all been frictionless sharing everything and anything – sometimes even credit card information, social security numbers and secret questions’ answers.

“Here-now” Social Network

The here-now network acts in a similar way to tweets which will show up for friends and other relevant people nearby. This means you can now share information with people around you that you may not want to make part of your permanent network. This could come in handy in a number of circumstances. For instance, if you were attending an event and require anything, you could let those that find those ‘haves’ or ‘needs’ nearby know and invite them over. As a bonus, this status shows up in notifications when you come in proximity with your friends.