Smart PR: Your Website Should Be a Media Resource
December 4, 2007 by Eric Eggertson
Filed under Marketing
You spend a lot of time and energy trying to interest the media in covering your organization. Don’t drop the ball and leave them begging for support materials.
That’s what the media section of your website is for. Maps, product descriptions, video, audio, low-res and high-res images – whatever a reporter or blogger is going to need should be there.
The advantage to pulling all the information together is that you only have to do it once. Then your "press room," or whatever you call the media section, acts like a self-serve cafeteria.
The Sierra Club press room is a decent example. They have news releases, senior management bios, ads, Spanish-language content, and more set aside in one place. YouTube’s offering is pretty sparse, but it doesn’t seem to be slowing down the media coverage. News releases and a fact sheet is about all you’ll find there. And, surprisingly, they don’t point to a YouTube video about YouTube. An embeddable short video about the company would be an obvious way to express YouTube’s unique nature.
Check out your website from the point of view of a journalist – print, electronic, and online. Have you truly anticipated the needs of people who want to report on your organization? If not, stop wasting time flooding the world with yet another news release, and spend some time beefing up the tools to help those who are trying to report on you.
YouTube logo courtesy Google Search, since it’s not downloadable from the YouTube press room.
Tags: tips, tools, business, communications, journalists, youtube, sierra club, corporate, value
Well said. I hadn’t seen the Sierra Club’s version. Thanks for the point. Your post is yet another in the list of “how you should do things” links I’m sending through the PR chain here!
This post comes at a great time for me. My management is slowly, very slowly, coming around to the notion of participating more often with our internal business blog. I’ve been working on getting a podcast out there as well. More importantly, I want such items – podcasts, video, pictures, etc. – out on our Internet! I plan to reference you in my next internal posting. Thanks!
I just love the irony. I can’t believe YouTube didn’t have a logo available for download from their press room.
Jason, Susan and Jill:
Thanks for the comments. There’s no perfect way to do this stuff. We just have to keep chipping away at the projects we have involvement in, and try not to let anyone get away with “but that’s the way we’ve always done it.”