If you don’t have a newsroom on the Internet, you may be missing the big picture.
Many Public Relations Firms, including corporate PR departments, are creating newsrooms for their clients or their businesses.
Newsrooms are an online version of a traditional newsroom. This is where news is generated and developed. It’s a great vehicle to get added exposure for your brand or your client’s brand. Once the media starts to use your newsroom and find it worthy, they will keep coming back for more stories. But until then, you need to build up your online community first before getting any play. If not used right, the traditional and online news media and bloggers may never see your release or information about the company or brand.
Here are some steps to getting more exposure for your newsroom:
• When you have a news story, tweet it out via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, etc. These social networking sites are a great way to target media both online and offline.
• Remember to keep your tweet, post, update, etc. to only 140 characters. This way the news media gets a quick view of what the story is about and can determine if it is something they are interested in.
• Send out your tweet more than once. Make sure that the news media and bloggers see the story.
• Direct the news media to your newsroom on the tweet. Make sure to add a link with a tiny URL.
• Keep track of who is entering your newsroom by looking at the Google analytics or any other analytic program that can tell you how many viewers clicked on your links. You may want to add a subscription to the newsroom.
• Make sure to have various tabs for industries or topics and a great search feature so that the news media can quickly find what they are looking for.
• When you feel you have a lot of content in your newsroom, send out an email reminder to your contacts to check out the site. In addition, tweet out that there is new information as well.
Public relations is changing and with it comes the distribution of press materials. The newsroom is a perfect venue to put all of your press releases, feature stories, and backgrounders from your clients. And tweeting is perfect for the news media and bloggers because it’s quick, it’s easy and they know what the story is about in 140 characters or less!
