How many of you have an online press room? The password protected, rarely updated, extension-of-a-brochure-ware website. Old school style. They should be named “Jump Through Hoops to Write About us Please. Thank You”.
Fact is, when I think of an online press room, that is what comes to mind. It’s antiquated.
In the world of digital, change is pervasive. Search algorithm updates, the emergence of social media tools like geo-location services. Change is everywhere, in perpetual motion.
It’s time for the online press room to change too. A social media newsroom can help with that. The concept was introduced by Todd Defren at PR Squared, and they have provided a template that anyone can use as a framework in building their own.
The social media newsroom offers a number of benefits to businesses and is another example of the continued blurring of lines between social media and PR (among other things).
Access
You want members of the media to write about you right?
In the past, traditional media-types would visit your online press room, request a password to view photos, select a few, you would burn them a disc and drop them in the mail to appear in an article two months from now. Timely right?
Not only has the timeliness of informational need changed, so has the media. You knew that though, right?
Fact is, bloggers are media too. The emergence and acceptance of “citizen journalism” means you need to make information available to them as well. A social media newsroom provides quick access to everyone.
Give Them What They Need
Provide all the information needed for the job. Compile research, links, whitepapers, reviews, media mentions and pertinent contact information among other things.
Organize the information by product, category etc. in an intuitive, easy to use manner. The easier you can make the job of the media, the better your chances of receiving coverage.
Brand Image
Provide images of your products, team members, logo or whatever else is appropriate. If a blogger is writing a post about your products, don’t make them search high and low for an image to use. Not only have you helped them do their job, you have ensured that the image isn’t something grabbed from a Google image search of low quality.
You know what would suck? An glowing media-mention about your product with a stretched, pixelated image.
Those are three simple reasons to create and maintain a social media newsroom. What do you see as the benefit?
What to Include
There is no exact recipe that will tell you everything to include. The great thing about using the framework provided by PR Squared, is you can simply add and remove elements that make sense for your business.
Think about the things media members in your market need and include them. My Suggestions?
Bookmarks
I love Delicious. There, I said it. Using Delicious bookmarks you can organize a wide variety of information by tag. Spend time planning and determining a tagging hierarchy that will make it easy to provide back-story and additional information in a very straight-forward, useful way.
As a simple example, there are links related to this post (from a presentation at Pubcon) here: http://www.delicious.com/patstrader/pubconpr.
RSS Feeds
If you have something to say and are publishing content, you need to make sure it is RSS enabled. Blogs, tweet streams, YouTube videos, Flickr streams, press releases. You get the idea.
Not only can you provide a clearly-labeled directory of feeds, you can parse them to display recent content from each feed. In a sidebar, you could have a list, linking to each feed, and in the body of the page, display last 10 Tweets, most recent videos and photos, blog headlines and more.
Make it Easy to Share
Is the content you are providing portable? For example, ensure it is easy to grab the code needed to embed a video.
Map Your Outposts
Literally taken, let people know where you are.
Imagine a blogger writing about your event or restaurant. Don’t make them do the legwork of finding directions or location information for their audience.
Additionally, provide links to your other social media outposts. Your Foursquare venue, or Facebook Fan Page for example. By providing links to these outposts, in conjunction with your RSS feed links, you are allowing the media to learn more about you and find additional sources of information which might be useful to them.
Display Your Media Mentions
Another adaptation of RSS feeds, you can multi-purpose your listening feeds, or use something as simple as Google News or Blog search.
Pull the feed, parse the information and display the most recent media mentions or blog posts about your brand or products. For the truly geektacular out there, you can do some creative things with Yahoo! Pipes and RSS Feeds.
Contact Information
If the media needs to contact you to complete their job, it needs to be painfully obvious who to contact and how.
For your media contacts, you can provide the preferred method of contact and the types of questions each person is best suited to answering. Using head shots, and LinkedIn profiles is another great way to provide additional information.
Leverage Your Assets
In these times of content-as-currency, you need to leverage your assets. Photos, videos, white papers, presentation slides or any other form of content you have created. Make it available.
Also, make it clear that the assets can be used by the media through use and display of a Creative Commons license. Again, anything you can do to make the media’s job easier and quicker to complete, the better.
This is just a simple overview of why and what to include if you are working on building a social media newsroom. There are many creative ways this could be implemented, what are some ideas you have?
The digital land rush. Remember that? 
