Tech Word of the Week II: "Earned Media"

Saigon's oldest digital man showed up yesterday for the Vietnam Digital Marketing and Technology Conference in Saigon and learned a new word: "Earned Media".

Earned Media is what happens when a piece of your media gets circulated by the digital community. A blog post, a Tweet a Facebook "like", a YouTube hit. Earned Media means what "viral" used to mean. It's free media exposure that you earn because others thought the information was valuable in some way. Maybe funny, maybe informative, maybe controversial but somehow useful and spreadable.

I was jokingly chided by a colleague earlier in the week for using the term UGC (User Generated Content). "That is SO 2009", he said. "It's crowd-sourcing now don'tcha know!" Shit. I remember entering my first room at BarCamp Saigon in the fall of 2008. It was like all the participants looked at me and wondered if there was some sort of Senior Citizen special going on. That was the year I started my blog and had about six months in it. This year I'm able to go to conferences with the #1 blog in Vietnam according to Technorati and I'm still an antique - young pups walking the old bloke around showing him shit like shiny round discs and explaining that data in the form of '1's and '0's all combined to form the picture of the semi nude avatar with the midieval sword he was watching. "Damn deez kids is smart!", said the geezer.

Now - which one of you little Einsteins can tell me what the CIS is? I learned that at a conference in 1998 - you know, the other century. If you can answer me that, I just might give you the $75 voucher I got from Google Adwords at the conference! And don't Google it. Just tell me. And don't call me, "dude". I've earned my media.

Late Notice: The Vietnam Digital Marketing and Technology Conference 2010

My sincere apologies to all. I'm way late on this one. Even back in July, Tony Troung from Golden Digital had asked me to be on the organizing committee for this conference, and what can I say? Things got lost. The other day I checked into LinkedIn, which I do every few days, and there were 35 requests for 'contacts' from all sorts of people. Tony was one of them. From July. So I'm blaming LinkedIn. Seems fair. Personally, I think all my contact requests had been 'leaked' to WikiLeaks and then just released this week when WikiLeaks got busted and pissed off and released my stuff just to show what kind of damage they could do if things got really hairy! I hear they've got film of Justin Beiber and Osama Bin Laden doing heroin in a cave somewhere. So, Word Up! The Vietnam Digital Marketing and Technology Conference is up on Thursday. See their website for full details. I like this one because it's partially hosted by a Vietnamese advertising agency and it's just really nice to see a Vietnamese company taking the lead for a change, instead of carpetbaggers from other countries. Cheers all. See you there. "I'll be covering it for Technorati. Of course they won't have Jimmy Wales (see photo), so I'll just have to hang with Aryeh Sternberg from Group M instead.

This is going to be one hell of a busy week. We have our second Saigon/CreativeMornings meeting on Tuesday and are now working with Tina Roth Eisenberg, AKA SwissMiss, to be a real franchised chapter of this fantastic series in Saigon and are just pumped about that. Then I have the conference above on Thursday, and of course, The Big Show on Friday and Barcamp Saigon on Sunday. And after all of that, I'll be writing my tail off for Technorati, Cheers again all. I need to work, and write.