The social newsroom
Why aren’t Aussie brands integrating social into their online newsrooms? In a feature that first appeared in Encore, Nic Christensen finds out.
The online newsroom used to be such an easy concept.
In a simpler time, the company would have a website and tucked away somewhere on the site they would post their media releases along with some company background and maybe, if journalists were lucky, a contact phone number for media inquiries.
Today brands are publishers in their own right and their communications are increasingly made across various platforms and often published simultaneously, which raises the question of integration. These days every brand has a Facebook and Twitter presence but clearly, much more can be done to utilise and integrate a brand’s online voice by establishing what has been dubbed a social media newsroom.
Think of the struggle to get Chief Executives and other senior operational managers to acknowledge the importance to the brand of managing media, understanding how media works and their priorities, getting senior management to back policy and procedures to allow proactive and reactive media management and aligning media relations activities with the organisation’s strategic priorities.
Now we’re saying to the leaders of organisations who have spent a decade getting comfortable with communicating to the media that we now not only want them to sign off the media release which has been approved by the head of the operational division and in-house counsel, but we also want to re-cut the same content in a casual way for Facebook, put together an authentic photo portfolio for Tumblr, say pithy and relevant things on Twitter etc etc.
And to top it off, do they realize that consumers are doing their own research via the newsroom on the company’s website? Or that, God forbid, their is increasing cross over browsing of the website? Or that the pesky consumers are increasingly visiting the online newsroom and other technical sections of the site instead of limiting themselves to superficial puff churned out but the glamourous FMCG marketing types?
It’s a minor miracle any integration is happening at all.
the missing point in this piece is that Aussie corporates aren’t prepared to put the money behind social media investment yet.
They need to treat this as seriously as a channel as some of their other marketing efforts and actually put the money behind the efforts in this area.
The biggest and most dangerous myth about social media was that it’s free…
No Social Newsrooms? How about Swayve.com – they have about 200 social newsrooms online now for their corporate PR clients. And it’s an Australian company. What it means is that journalists can subscribe to the brands they want, when they want, and in the medium they choose. Brands can integrate all their communications into one repository.