Whether your company is large or small, global or local, public or private, your public relations team helps to frame the message that affects you and your valued customers. Our recent news is filled with oil spills, floods, and product recalls. These events can quickly elevate or destroy the image, and ultimately the profitability, of a company. Communication representatives must stay ahead of these events with a strong and timely response that doesn't just include press releases and press conferences. Coordinating messages, information distribution, and seamless answers to media inquiries can exhaust your existing resources. Ask yourself: Are your PR resources ready to manage a major story? The first step starts with an Online Newsroom.
Some recent examples have illustrated the importance of an online newsroom:
- Toyota's recent recall demanded a timely response to the media that included thorough information that answered questions and concerns from consumers and the media. Their online newsroom, http://pressroom.toyota.com, received thousands of hits from reporters and analysts everyday and kept Toyota out front of the news cycle. Toyota took forward action during the crisis, helping to restore consumer faith in their product, recently indicating their company would show profits in 2010.
- BP has kept the media informed through their online newsroom with their tactics to combat their current oil spill, avoiding the spin common in today's news world when company's don't quickly deliver their side of the story. Despite a current solution to the problem, their proactive approach certainly stems from lessons they learned from the Exxon Valdez catastrophe and has portrayed the company as taking charge of the situation.
- During the recent floods in Nashville, locally-headquartered Dollar General donated much needed food, supplies and financial resources to thousands of victims in the affected three state area. With their online newsroom and information distribution through the internet they can get the word out to encourage more customers to do the same. Their positive impact on local residents will certainly not be forgotten.
In light of these critical events, does your online newsroom possess the infrastructure to meet these PR demands? With an online newsroom that combines up-to-the-minute news announcements, pictures, social media, and videos, the company online newsroom becomes a virtual news site, a CNN.com of sorts, allowing the PR department to stay ahead of the rapidly changing news cycle, delivering the message the company needs to deliver. Reporters are notified of updates through an online newsroom database, and rather than receiving thousands of calls requesting information, reporters are diverted to the online newsroom to download the information - saving valuable time and money.
Regardless of the size of your company, the cost benefit of an online newsroom is immeasurable, considering the millions that are potentially won or lost when companies fail to control the message the press ultimately delivers.
So ask yourself, what is your current online newsroom capability? If your PR team needs answers to these questions, you need to contact iPressroom,
www.ipressroom.com, and begin creating an online newsroom that can meet the PR demands of today's evolving new media environment.