An Online Newsroom

A staple of public relations is the practice of creating press releases and distributing them to journalists, or crafting story ideas and pitching them to media. This is called media relations. And this activity should support all that an organization has going on - its marketing, branding, positioning, advertising, etc. 

Technology, more than any other thing, has caused the convergence of traditional public relations, marketing and advertising. 

To be effective today at securing customers or influencing opinion - and ultimately action - you must master the Web. 

An online newsroom assists in your quest for online brand domination, and here's how: 

1. Press releases inherently contain keywords and appropriate information for your company or organization, product or service. When you publish press releases online you benefit from increased search engine placement for your keywords.
2. People are searching for information. Increasingly old print mediums are falling behind the Internet. By self-publishing your information, you provide it straight from the horse's mouth, so-to-speak.
3. If you have a good online newsroom, your news and announcements are tied to a Really Simple Syndication feed. That's the same technology that powers blogs and makes blogging such a powerful search placement tool. Utilizing RSS in a newsroom turns it into an equally powerful search placement tool. Remember, it contains keywords and you update the information frequently. A press release a week, published in an online media room, will go a long way to position you at the top of online search results.
4. If your online newsroom makes it easy for people to share your information, then you're participating in social media. People should be able - with very little effort - to share your news through inbound links, tagging, or on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. (ShareThis.com provides this service for free.) It also helps if they can print your press release with little effort and have a document that looks and feels like a press release with your corporate logo and contact information included. You could provide a PDF of each release for this purpose.
5. Posting press releases makes it easy for brand champions to share your news with their social networks online. Today, good public relations isn't necessarily as much about reaching that one top tier publication as it is about how deep your network is and how many individuals will share your information with their friends. It's about leveraging your network. This is word of mouth marketing, and technology (word of mouse) helps it work even better.
6. Online marketing strategy is no longer encompassed by a corporate home page. In fact, you ought to consider Google search as your home page. The more search results you control, the more likely you are to succeed online. Instead of utilizing your dot-com site as your main Internet presence, it should become a news portal - a place where you link to all your Internet properties - which can include your newsroom, blog(s), Twitter account(s), Facebook page(s), employees' LinkedIn pages, Flickr account(s), YouTube account(s), online reference libraries like Digg and Del.icio.us, etc. To increase the number of search lottery tickets you posses, be sure to make your blog and newsroom separate sub-domains of your main domain.
7. An online newsroom, like your main Web site, becomes a news portal where you link to all your Internet properties. This is called inbound linking and only increases page rank and traffic to your sites - both very good things.
8. An online newsroom should include multimedia such as images, photos, graphics, documents, video and audio files. With multimedia files associated with your press releases, you have a much greater chance of someone sharing your information either online, in print or in person. We live in a YouTube world where people want it all: words, audio and video.
9. Interactivity is key. A newsroom provides multiple ways to interact with your company. From viewing executive biographies and headshots, to linking to your social media sites, to sharing video about your latest product, the newsroom (like your home page) should be a place where your key constituencies can touch and feel your company. A list of press releases barely scratches the surface of what an online newsroom should be.
10. It's a microsite. Think of your press room as a standalone Web site. It should be used to tell your whole story. You can position your organization as a leader in the industry by building a newsroom that includes RSS feeds of national or worldwide industry news. Why not share what others in your industry are doing? It can be found easily online anyway. You should make information easy to find on your own site, keeping visitors and attention on a site you manage.

Pete Codella, APR is a social media evangelist. In addition to serving as the Social Media Club of Salt Lake City's first program director, he is the owner and operator of Codella Marketing and NewsCactus, a hosted online newsroom solution. He has received numerous awards and always enjoys a good communication challenge. See PeteCodella.com for more information, and check out his social media song music video at YouTube.com/CodellaMarketing.