Best practices for your online newsroom
Last week, I wrote about the basic materials that, when combined with your media kit, will provide the media with all of the components that they need in order to cover your company, with or without your input. In addition to having these materials at the ready, in the hands of your agency, it’s best to house all of these components along with your media kit in an online newsroom on your web site. Here are our recommendations to a best practices approach for building and maintaining your online newsroom:
- a clear link to it from the front page of the corporate web site (and clear navigation back to the home page once you’re in the newsroom);
- a one-paragraph corporate overview on the landing page, full contact information and further links to:
- corporate backgrounder, executive biographies, product descriptions and other support materials (essentially the contents of a media kit). This section can also include good quality jpegs of the company logo, and head shots of executives;
- current and archived news releases;
- media coverage published on other sites or for which you have obtained a license to post on your own site. In the former, the link should open in a new window; in the latter, it should open a PDF page within the site.
We have recently launched several clients that have done a great job of following these guidelines on their own web sites: Essential Life Data and Singletouch. Visit their sites and see if there are any improvements that you could make to your company’s site, based on the guidelines above.
