Why wouldn’t you have a corporate media section on your website?
I’ve noticed a couple of trends recently, which at first glance seem to be going in opposite directions.
Expansive: Social Media Newsroom
Some companies are developing extremely smart social media newsrooms. I recently discussed the Social Media Newsroom X Factor panel at Social Media in a Corporate Context, which highlighted some very interesting developments.
These are all-singing full-on newsrooms, with every conceivable use of social media, multimedia and reusable elements, so that visitors can pick up, reuse, and share the content wherever seems appropriate to them. Do go and look at the Sony Ericsson version – and check all the tabs – because the screenshot doesn’t do it justice.
Something to think about, if you’re going in this direction, is whether this will replace the traditional newsroom – as in the Sony Ericsson example – or whether it will be an additional feature.
Example: Sony Ericsson
Lean and Elegant: News Releases
And then there are the companies which provide only their news releases.
These are sometimes beautifully presented, with helpful search and filtering options. Potash is a great example of this: I really like the clean look of the list pages (and the easy access to filtered RSS feeds), and if you visit individual releases, you can see how well they’ve implemented them:
- links within the release to elsewhere on the corporate site, and easily downloadable PDFs
- tabbed content within the release
- webcasts, slides and transcripts available within the release
Example: PotashCorp
This isn’t the only large company I’ve noticed recently that offers just news releases in what is conventionally known as the Media section. Are these companies who used to provide an extensive media section but now have scaled it right back? Or are these companies moving in the opposite direction, and building up a section from scratch – with news releases being the first step?
Or – and perhaps more interestingly – maybe these are two aspects of the same trend towards spreading content (images, videos, comment and conversation) across the web. One approach is to make it easy for others to spread the content; the other approach is to put the content out in locations where people might find it more easily.
If a company has social media outposts on places like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube, do they need a newsroom on site in addition?
Please let us know what you think by commenting below…
Lucy is Editor at Corporate Eye
Hi Lucy,
Glad you enjoyed the conference. You and your readers might be interested to know that we have a webinar on social media newsrooms this Thursday at 14:00, and Merran Wrigley from Sony Ericsson will be discussing her social media newsroom there too, as will Erica Zandelin from Scania, which is another great example. Daljit Bhurji from Diffusion PR will run through other ways to engage journalists. I hope you can listen in. It’s free, but you do need to register first at http://bit.ly/cHhBQR
Andrew
Thanks Andrew – sounds great!