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.
/// COMMENTS
No Comments »Rich Young
March 29, 2008 5:36 pmHi Great post. With all due respect, the “media kit” section of Essential Life Data needs quite a bit of work. First, it’s WAY too text heavy and one has to scroll quite a ways down the page to find additional information. It’s extremely dull and static. A company doesn’t have to be the size of Cisco to have a fully functioning and aesthetically pleasing media kit page:
http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/corporate_information.html
Just my $.02. -Rich
Linda
March 31, 2008 12:13 pmThanks for your comment, Rich.
My post was meant to highlight that the media center of the site does indeed contain all of the information that the media would need in order to cover the company, but your point about the media kit itself is well taken. The entire document from the media kit is indeed viewable on the site for easy access, and perhaps is, as you say, “too text heavy” but the document is also available as a PDF download, should the site visitor wish to read it offline. I would be interested to hear how you suggest they make their media kit more dynamic.
Essential Life Data is a new company with a new web site, and as a result is in the process of establishing a presence in its target media which, once achieved, will be highlighted in the news coverage section. Hopefully, this additional material will help lend some dynamism to the look and feel of the media center.
Rich Young
March 31, 2008 8:37 pmHi Linda, absolutely. I trust the “buzz” media coverage section will be chalk full of articles when you’re done with it!
Anyway, yes, a few thoughts to make it more dynamic. Obviously, you know your client and I do not but we all know that certain clients are more comfortable, shall we say, embracing new media techniques, etc.
-Arsenault seems like a pretty credible insider, how about have a 2 minute video of him talking about why he chose to start the company, his background etc.
– I noticed the Flow Chart. I also noticed it’s extremely confusing. Perhaps have the CEO or CTO “whiteboard’ the chart in a video, have it reside in the media kit section.
– I love graphical timelines of company milestones (this may not be appropriate if it’s a start up).
– fact sheet
– seems this is a very complicated and complex issue that we all have to face but have little idea how. the media kit should have appropriate material to help the journalist learn. not just definitions but links to supporting material, current new article feed.
Just a few thoughts. -Rich
Linda
April 01, 2008 3:56 pmThank you for your insightful comments, Rich. As you can see from today’s post, your thoughts on dynamic media centers are indeed timely! Thanks for reading.