One of my former coworkers used to call himself a "recovering attorney". He had realized the folly of his way and at some point escaped the grip of "The Firm".
I am a recovering journalist. I have a degree in journalism, worked at that profession for a decade and finally escaped it a fews years back. What I learned from that decade of experience has really helped shape work I do now for clients. But as I sit here today, I wonder if we haven't been missing the mark all this time.
Recently I have been involved with part of a team here at
Optiem that has been working on the concept of a
social media newsroom. The idea is actually a very simple one, but one that for some reason has eluded many of the web clients I have dealt with over the years. And although I have been looking this solution right in the eye now for a few weeks, I still marvel at the simplicity of the idea. And I keep asking "why didn't we do this before?"
We have been seeing a lot of buzz about this concept and we have been sharing a proof of concept (see the link above) for this "social media newsroom." We are currently working to make these social media newsrooms reality for several of our clients. They are very excited about it.
So what IS a Social Media Newsroom? As my coworker, and fellow "thought leader"
Vince Bank puts it...
"A social newsroom is about tearing down barriers between companies and respective publics, including members of the press. It's about fostering seamless, simple communication between media and organizations. And it's about organizational transparency, responsiveness and accessibility."
And quite honestly these aren't high and mighty words or concepts. These are in fact really easy and simple things to achieve. All we are really doing is providing an aggregation of all the relevant information available about a company on ONE web page. And you probably wouldn't be surprised to hear that these kinds of pages do REALLY well in the search engines.
So what kinds of things can one find in a SMNR? Here are but a few of the items you might find...
- Easy to use and locate directories, bookmarks and other social sites such as de.lici.ous, Technorati, and Flickr.
- All kinds of rss feeds available from the company
- direct access to top-level management through several social channels such as LinkedIn
- Press Room materials such as a repository of print-ready documents like high resolution company logos and photographs, whitepapers, and brand guideline documents
- a firm's blogs and blogroll
- access to company events, schedules and calendars, and
- a highly adaptable format, easily customized to a client's goals and needs
We at Optiem are excited, obviously, about the idea. And our clients are actually chomping at the bit to get their social newsrooms up and populated.
This is just another one of those examples where the simplest of ideas may indeed be the best. And I'm happy to say that we are among those leading the way in this simplicity.
As a journalist, finding accurate, easy to digest information was always the hardest part of the job. Social media newsrooms make it possible for anyone looking for information about your company to get it all... in one-stop-shop style.
