Online press rooms
| Online press rooms | |
06 May 2005
Sending out press releases is the usual way of achieving this end but a web site can support these efforts by providing an online press room for the media. The odds of picking up vital editorial column inches can only be significantly enhanced by supplying media-friendly material on demand 24 x 7. To get a flavour of the content normally found in online press rooms try visiting a few corporate sites and checking out how they do it. Here are a few excellent examples to get you started: Google BT Apple It would be, of course, unreasonable to expect the small to micro-sized business to have the resources or content output to match the likes of these large multinational companies. However, there are fundamental pointers all companies should pick up on when planning an online press room. Firstly, the phrase, press room. While 99 per cent of humanity use the word press to encompass all forms of the media, traditionally, within journalism, the broadcast media, TV and radio, get irritated with the label and prefer media as the generic term. It’s slightly pedantic but it’s worth knowing anyway when deciding on the door sign. So, sticking with the colloquial press room, what is it and what furniture does it need? A good press room should be a one-stop focal point for the media to find out more about your company, get background details about products and services, and obtain contact details. It should also be up to date, easy to use, contain your latest news and offer a searchable archive of all past news releases. There should be, in addition, a means for journalists to subscribe to future news releases you may be putting out. This service can be either by email mailing list or by RSS if you have a company blog. The latter option is becoming more and more popular with journalists as RSS offers them control and is often easier to manage than an overloaded email inbox. Visiting online press rooms will give some clues as to the type of content to include, but imagine that you’ve arrived on the site knowing nothing about your company. What would you want to know? Answering who, what, where, when, why and how are good places to start. It’s unlikely a small firm of joiners, for example, would want to post a profile of the company’s ‘executives’. But a profile of the company would be appropriate. This would essentially be a company CV, spelling out the company history, background and highlights. The press room could also contain:
Find out more next time in Part Two of Online Press Rooms. | |