Building
a website with current information about your business is one of the most important
things you can do in establishing your company's credibility with the media. More
than ever, the company website has become the first place reporters turn for basic
information about businesses. Having key facts about your company readily available
at their fingertips becomes an important investment. This is not only true for
large corporations but for small companies as well.
In fact Vocus Inc., the leading
supplier of automated tools for PR professionals, recently completed an interesting
survey on this subject. When interviewing 1,000 journalists, 86 percent of them
revealed that a company's website is the first place they look in order to find
information on a company. Three out of five reporters said that they will look
at a website first in order to decide whether or not to make contact. Additionally,
90 percent of the journalists also said that they wasted valuable time combing
through websites in search of information.
Those
are important statistic because having an easily accessible online newsroom is
not very hard to achieve and doesn't have to cost thousands of dollars to implement.
The advantages to building an online newsroom that contains pertinent company
information are clear: You not only help to make a journalist's job much easier,
but in doing so, you may also significantly increase the chances of having your
company included in that journalist's story.
If
you need help developing your online newsroom, start by following some of these
suggestions:
Design
your online newsroom with the local as well as international press in mind:
We live in a global business community so even the smallest company's website
can play a major role in International PR. Your company may be located in the
United States, but reporters from around the world may have an interest in your
business. One of the simplest things you can do to give your site more impact
is to spell out the dates in your releases (i.e., January 10, 2004 instead of
01-10-2004) so that they adhere to international global date formats. For many
reporters around the world, the latter example above would be interpreted as October
1, 2004. Doing this could mean the difference between your website's content being
seen as current or stale.
Properly
label your news area: Give your news area a name easily recognizable to journalists.
Examples of this could be "Newsroom" or "Press Center." Journalists tend to associate
the term "Media Kit" with sales information and advertising rates, and therefore
may choose not click on the link.
Make
your online newsroom easily accessible: Your online newsroom should be no
more than one click away from the homepage. Provide quick press contact information:
Not only list the name of your press person, but also make all means of contact
(office phone, cell phone, and pager numbers) within a 24-hour day available to
them. Also provide a personal e-mail address (i.e., cathy_smith@acme.com) rather
than a generic one (i.e, communications@acme.com.) Journalists on deadline will
not take a chance on sending a message to a generic e-mail address because they
figure they will not receive a timely response.
Include
links to all relevant company information: Journalists should be able to access
your company fact sheet, mission statement, statistics, background materials and
executive bios. Making this information available on your site helps the reporter
in building the foundation for his story.
List
all company press releases in descending order: Give your visitors your freshest
information first. In addition, when distributing your press release via wire
services, be sure to upload a copy to your website immediately as well. Also,
keep in mind that reporters may be accessing information from a variety of locations
(home, office, remote locations) so make sure that the release is available in
multiple formats (html and .pdf) for quick and easy downloading. If your company
has distributed more than ten releases, then make sure that the releases are searchable
by headline, type, date and year.
Present
your company's news coverage and make it searchable: Let the reporters see
what other media outlets have said about your company -- even if some of the stories
are not friendly to your company. It shows that your company has third-party endorsements,
lends credibility, and will help in developing more interest in your story.
Make
multimedia files available and downloadable: These resources would include
digital images (i.e., logos, corporate and product photos), as well as short audio
and video clips. Make sure that digital images are available in multiple formats
(JPEG, GIF, TIFF, and EPS). TIF and EPS are listed because print journalists will
need the images delivered to them at a much higher resolution (at least 300 dpi)
than the standard resolution found on the web (72 dpi). List the size of the multimedia
files so that the reporter can gauge how long it will take to download. It's also
a great idea to make audio and video clips available for use on a variety of different
players (i.e., Real Audio or Windows Media Player), or at least indicate which
player should be used.
Optimize
your online newsroom for search engines: Journalists spend a great deal of
time using the Internet to find or research stories. Optimize the keywords associated
with your company and the industry in which it belongs so that journalists will
be able to find your company during their search on Google.
If
your company doesn't already have an online newsroom yet, then now is a great
time to start developing one. In doing so you would be creating a one-stop shop
for news releases, photos, and any other content deemed important by reporters
to do his or her job more efficiently. You'd be ahead of the game, too, because
if you ask most journalists what they think about most online newsrooms, they
will tell you that most of them are horrible. Use this opportunity to build something
that reporters will find useful and feel comfortable visiting again and again
for solid information. As small-business owners, here is your chance to level
the media playing field, and get the coverage that your company deserves. Having
a great online newsroom can carry you along ways toward achieving your goals.
Notable
Resources:
Carolyn
Davenport-Moncel is president and founder of Mondave
Communications, a global marketing and communications firm based in Chicago
and Paris, and a subsidiary of MotionTemps,
LLC. Contact her at carolyn@motiontemps.com
or by phone in the United States at 877.815.0167 or 011.331.4997.9059 in France.
