The Social Newsroom

65% of journalists are now using social media to find story ideas and it’s high time PR folk made their online newsrooms a place that makes it easy to find, use and share corporate news content, said Lisa Buyer in the session on PR, Search and Social at SES London this past week.

Social Media Newsroom Checklist

According to Buyer your online newsroom needs to be:

• Updated at least once a week
• A hub for all social media content and networks
• A place to display and share video and images
• Syndicating your content with RSS feeds by category
• Sharing the content with the ‘like’ button on each press release
• A place to tweet your content directly

According to our recent survey the #1 item PR people want in an  online newsroom is the ability to connect to all their social content.

#2 is the ability to add news in the social media release format, with images and video embedded.

At another conference held in London recently, Social Media in a Corporate Context, companies spoke about why they had moved to a social media newsroom, and listed some of the benefits they found:

• projecting good news, and news to interest consumers, not just professional journalists
• supporting a brand refresh, with new brand values including ‘openness’ requiring that this be demonstrated on the corporate site
• significant increase in the number of visits per week – from 5 per week to over 2,000
• decrease in time-to-publish, so they were able to respond faster, which was of particular benefit in managing crises
• the ability to provide embeddable, sharable content for visitors to reuse, reaching their target influencers and spreading the brand message

For more information on social media, PR and online  newsrooms follow us on Twitter

Even as the experts exhort us to become media companies and produce more and more content, Google’s algorithm change this week reminded marketers to pay attention to the quality of their content. Being a media company, in addition to whatever business you are in, requires a new way of thinking and a platform that can house your content.

“Being a modern, relevant media company involves a pivot of your communications strategy to put an owned channel at the center. You don’t see popular media brands yielding their online presence  100% to the stream.”  Adam Singer

WordCast offers these tips for producing good quality content

• Write original content
• If you use material from another site put it in bold and quotes with a link to that site
• When you reference something add your own original comments with the link
• Add original thoughts and perspective to links, videos, and photographs
• Spend at least 2 hours writing a blog post rather than just blog ‘off the top of your head’
• Create good “quick takes” that you can put in a Tweet

Creating excellent content is one part of this equation.  Where you house the content is the other.

You do need to feed your content into the social web.

But it is just as important to also have that owned channel at the center of  your content and communication strategy.  Youcan build one with platforms like Drupal and Worpress, but it takes time adn expertise. (and that takes $$$)

Or you can use an online newsroom with social content features, as DoubleTree Hotels has done.

They chose to use PRESSfeed to do the heavy lifting and their owned channel was up and running in a few weeks.