What should be included besides press releases... yawn... in the pressrooms you design for clients? What about your own company's media center?

The number one rule for developing an online pressroom is to think like a journalist. Think about the information that could be most helpful to someone writing a story about your client's company and then make it available. Like many things that can impact how a company is perceived, doing a good job designing an online pressroom is a complicated process. And it's one that can have a substantial positive payoff.

I studied pressrooms on the sites of over 50 prominent companies. The best ones give journalists solid, relatively fluff-free information - sometimes even negative information - to help them write their stories. And while press releases in the media area of a site may be helpful for financial results, they don't have much use beyond that.

Make Contact Information Prominent

The number one use of the Internet by journalists is research. They come to the pressroom of a site needing to quickly learn how to contact the PR department for information. Incredibly, pressrooms of many major corporations give only a general email address and not the PR staff contact names and phone numbers. In those cases, the purpose of having a pressroom is hard to fathom.

I call the lack of contact names and phone numbers the Web Wizard of Oz Syndrome, and consider it a bad practice. It is absolutely crucial that a direct contact number for the PR department be provided. Better yet, give the names and contact numbers (day and night) for all PR staff. It is advisable to prominently note that the PR staff deals only with the media and to offer names and numbers for consumer concerns.

Don't Hide the Press Room

You'd never know that some companies even have a pressroom because they use a completely separate URL, which is not accessible from the main site. Only the incredibly diligent or the invited may visit those pressrooms.

In a widespread practice that makes no sense, a lot of companies require registration for entry to the pressroom. Some take 24 hours to provide a password. Not much help to a reporter on a deadline, looking for a PR contact.

Presumably companies believe requiring registration will help them keep track of who's keeping track of them. And they seem to want to keep riff-raff like customers from knowing the company story. Given that most pressrooms contain little more than press releases, it is hard to understand why in the world they would issue releases and then deny public access to them. Besides, there's a name for most customers who want to know all the details about a company: investors. Why turn them away?

Give Full Information

Few pressrooms include articles about the company that have run in the media. Almost none include negative coverage in their site. Yet it is futile to hide news about a company because anyone who knows how can find the information quickly and easily by using a variety of online research facilities.

Media-friendly Press Room Features

The point of the pressroom is to make finding information about the company easy for a reporter. Companies that understand this have media-friendly pressroom features, including:

• Search of the pressroom by date, topic, keyword, type of file, archive or current
• Documents available for download in PDF format
• Company Position Papers and Statements to the Press on issues
• Background and public record information on legal issues
• Email alert service when news is added to the site
• Links to outside sites which may contain negative information on issues
• Photos and graphics in three resolutions and download sizes
• Lists of job changes in the media covering the industry and job changes/new jobs in the PR department
• A "geek section" with technical information in plain English as well as product specs, R&D info, etc.
• Forms for reporters to order video and stills
• A list of the company's key competitors
• Customer demographics
• The name, address, home and work phone, fax and email of worldwide PR staff and key personnel for the company's offices, plants, worldwide locations, with maps
• Calendar of trade shows and industry events

The common denominator of outstanding features in the top online press rooms was an acute awareness of the needs of journalists and a desire to make getting information about the company as easy as possible.

Online Pressrooms: It Takes More Than A Press Release