I'm a web strategist and aspiring know-it-all with a passion for all things digital. I've worked in PR, advertising and not-for profit industries, and now I run a creative agency. These are the things I think about, and am sometimes compelled to write. More...

Mediaroom 2.0

Jan 18 2007
6

It’s a beautiful time where I work right now.  We’re about to move into a brand new studio, and we’re just about to ditch our two-year old flash website and replace it with a brand-new, sleek, RSS enabled, social media-friendly thing of pure Web beauty.

When I started almost a year ago, I asked to have a media room thrown together on the website.  At the time, my main need was somewhere to store the releases, ideally RSS enabled.  At that point, we were beginning the website redesign, so I couldn’t ask for the moon.

But now, we’re at the planning stages of developing the our new not-tacked-on media room, and I have to place my order.  I’ve done quite a bit of research, but I’ve found that not many people are talking about online media rooms, except for saying that they’re important.  We’ve talked about the social media press release, but what about the social media room?  Seems like there should be something there.

So, my question is – what does your dream media room look like?

For my purposes, I need the media room to provide reporters with instant access to breaking news (through RSS or email subscription).  I also need reporters that I am source-filing with to have access to a breadth of information about the company, our experts and our latest projects.  We need to be easily found by journalists researching stories in our industry.  We want bloggers writing on the advertising and gaming industy to find the site and use it as an ongoing reference for material.  We want conference and event planners to have easy access to our main speakers bios, and to ensure that they can contact us easily.

In a nutshell, new visitors should be introduced, educated and convinced.  We then want to transition those visitors to subscribers so that they are kept up-to-date.  Subscribers should then be retained and kept instantly appraised of any news from the site.

So, that’s all pretty much under the “obvious” header.  The question is – how do we do it?

It’s pretty clear that when it comes to retaining users and keeping them up-to-date, RSS is absolutely key.  All of the sections, from bios to new press releases should be tied into an RSS feed that allows interested reporters, bloggers and the like to be kept up to date.  That being said, not all reporters are RSS users, so it needs to be backed up with an email feed as well. 

The purpose of the section is also to promote our experts as, well, experts.  Since we want to connect media and bloggers to our experts, we can used LinkedIn as a resource for source filing.  This way, media who needs sources on a particular subject can add and easily find our experts. We will also want to link these bios to their blogs, podcasts and media quotes where possible, so that those interested can get more detail on the expertise of the writers. Bios should be tagged as well, so that a search on the site will find these articles.

Most of the content of the individual press releases is done for us, thanks to Todd Defren and the social media press release gang.  Of course, all press releases should include relevant multimedia, links to articles and bios of people mentioned in the release, links to projects mentioned, Technorati tags to give context within the blogosphere and of course, a method to easily bookmark individual releases.

When it comes to speaking, all upcoming and past speaking engagements should be listed, with links to their respective websites.  Where possible, it would be nice to have archived footage of highlights from speaking engagements as well.

So, those are my thoughts – I’d love to hear yours.  Are there other ways we can integrate social media tools into a media room in a meaningful way?  I think there are possibilities for Skype and instant messaging, but I feel that would require far too many IM clients on the go at any given time.  Comments?  Not sure about that… possibly, but they’d have to add value to the materials already there.

To my mind, the information must be broad, but must have third-party depth.  It’s one thing to say you’re the best, but if we can back it up with blogs and LinkedIn users and comments that agree with us, that’s where the real value of social media comes in.

This isn’t going to change the world in any way, but I think it’s worthwhile to dust off the old-fashioned media room and do something interesting with it. So,speak up, social media dreamers.  What does your dream (media) room look like?

  • http://flacklife.blogspot.com Bob LeDrew

    I think that your ideas are really ambitious. Too ambitious, in many cases, for the journalists who would be your key audience.

    Maybe it’s different for those journalists who are fully immersed in tech journalism, but I think that they’re not much beyond using e-mail. For every David Akin there are a million Larry Kings (no disrespecting King here).

    If you want to build it ‘cos it’s cool, that’s OK. But don’t forget your key audience.

  • http://www.responsiblepress.org Joe Boughner

    This isn’t so much in the social media realm but given that what your company does is advergaming and flash etc, what about doing the speakers’ bios as cartoons? Animate your key spokespeople and have them deliver their best pitch for themselves.

    I don’t know, maybe that’s corny. And you’d need to have print bios for people who don’t want to watch the vid and for, well, printing, but it could be engaging if done well.

    And yea, to echo Bob LeDrew’s comments, have a simple-ass section where old school journos can still get their fix of -30-s.

  • http://www.ryananderson.ca Ryan

    I was speaking rather generally, when I was throwing out those comments, but specific to my own personal situation, I think you’d be surprised who our target media is.

    That being said, you’re right – it is ambitious, but I think my massive brain dump makes it seem more complicated than it really is. At the heart of it, it’s just a regular media room, with regular content. I propose that the purpose of a media room, for my company or any other, is to provide journalists a simple way to gather context on news announcements.

    For the old schoolers, the words are on the screen in the right order. For the technophiles, they’ve got some easy ways to stay in touch and dig deeper.

  • http://www.greenbanana.com Heather Yaxley

    Something that I feel would be helpful on media websites is to manage information overload better.

    Maybe with the ability to ask a question and get an answer rather than having to wade through material to find what you want. I always wonder why if a journo wants too know the CEO’s age, they have to find his biog, look for a date of birth and work it out for themselves – couldn’t they type in “how old is the CEO?” and get an answer, for example?

    I don’t mean a list of static Q&A or a search box that highlights sections of the site where your word/phrase can be found, but like a virtual press officer that who can link intelligently and take you where you need to go.

    And, extending from that, there could be smart “recommendations” – in the same way that Amazon suggests reading you might like, could the site show what else might be useful to you. (Beyond the pre-set links in social media releases).

    Also, sites need to be really intuitive and so accommodate the techy-shy. If it isn’t easy to find what they want, the “old schoolers” will naturally not bother or call the press officer for even the simplest questions.

    Mind you, the online “virtual” media room needs to remain a resource to supplement the real thing as there’s nothing like human contact to go that bit further and also build the vital media relationships.

  • Jill Blake

    A jargon buster column would be useful to encourage non-techis.

    How about having a “room” for journalists to store what they’ve researched? There’s nothing worse than thinking you’ve read a wee gem of an idea somewhere and not being able to remember where.

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