Engaging Media – Value of the online newsroom

As the media landscape changes - reductions in traditional full time media and an increase of a disperse set of bloggers and citizen journalists - public relations professionals (our clients) are getting more creative in order to generate earned media. Whether it’s High Road (client) tailoring their ‘media events’ to accommodate bloggers’ day jobs by planning an after work bloggers reception for FORZA Motorsport 3, or Media Profile taking a laser focus on piquing a journalists attention in five words or less, change is in the air.

The creativity however, doesn’t stop with traditional word smithing and event planning. Instead, industry leaders are challenging their colleagues to make the experience for traditional journalists, bloggers, and citizen journalists better, while saving time in the process. They’re asking:

• How do we continue to engage media after the face-to-face interaction?
• Media liked what they’ve heard, now how do we make it easy for them to access the information they need to write their article/blog post?
• With so many bloggers and citizen journalists, how can we save time providing digital resources like photos, fact sheets, etc?
• How do we connect with our audience when they’re using social sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Flikr?

Though the audience and engagement strategy will differ by client, we found that an online newsroom tailored specifically to the clients engagement strategy can be a great enabler and launching point to get creative in answering these questions.

Here are a few good examples to get you thinking:
http://news.microsoft.ca/
http://pressroom.toyota.com/
http://www.timhortons.com/ca/en/about/about_media.html

When PR professionals approach us to help them unleash their creativity, whether for an online newsroom or something else, we take down the technical barriers and fit the technology to their strategy – not the other way around.