POEM is a way of categorising media. In this case, we’ll be speaking about the digital world, but it could also be non-digital.

So the first letter in the acronym is P for Paid.

This refers to all types of media you pay for. For example, buying key words on Google, buying advertisements or display spaces. This type of marketing is quick and easy to implement because you simply pay to been seen. However, it’s expensive and not necessarily a good way to create trust. People are less likely to trust your message when it’s an advertisement. So that’s your paid media. This type of media is easy to analyse because we have major web analytics tools to help measure the return on investment for paid media.

The second category is O or Own media.

This refers to media you own. You can put messages on your website, your Facebook page, your Twitter account or any digital space you can create and own. Of course you don’t necessarily own it in the strict sense because you don’t “own” Facebook, but you can manage your page. Setting up this type of media is more complex and takes times. You have to create content or have others create it. In terms of trust, consumers might trust these messages a little bit more because there’s the brand’s authority behind it. The company is handling it directly and it can inspire a bit more trust.

The third category is E for Earned media.

Basically this refers to media that you’ve earned. It’s the holy grail of digital marketing because it’s really what the web is about, all those user reviews and ratings. However, remember that although we often think of this in positive terms, it can be negative. Be careful you don’t earn negative attention. Earned can also refer to content produced by internet users. Brands like Apple benefit from enormous quantities of content produced by internet users. That’s superb because it’s really a mark of earned recognition. However, this type of recognition takes time. You have to be excellent all the time in order to earn this type of recognition. It’s hard to measure because you have to collect information from everywhere. Data marketing is the ability to measure feedback from consumers and internet users. And this is very complex in terms of data

And finally, the M simply stands for Media.

Original author / source: Marc Prunier