OK, so I more or less agree with Forrester’s lumping of “types” of media in marketing parlance.

The one quibble I have with it – and it’s admittedly small – is that “earned media” still means things like getting a client in the newspaper since that practice has not gone away, it’s just that other activities have been added on to it.

But the question those of us in my industry usually run in to is something along the lines of “Well, but what do I do with my owned media?” They see the value in having a blog, Twitter account or whatever but aren’t sure they’ll be able to keep it active.

One of the answers I usually give in response is, in addition to industry news and thought leadership type updates/posts, a lot of what is being done in the Paid Media and Earned Media channels. Link to those blog posts your social media team worked so hard on, the newspaper story a PR person spent six months pitching. Write up an overview of the new ad campaign the company is launching.

All of that is an easy source of content that requires little additional research or legwork. It can’t be *just* that but should also incorporate, as I said, pieces and updates designed to advance program goals (pageviews, sales leads, whatever) as well as those smaller updates, the kind that aren’t big enough for a press release or full PR effort but which are still important to communicate and which are going to be appealing to some subset of your audience. But those are easy ways to come up with regular content, by doing what online media is supposed to do: Listen and link.