• the legal department won’t approve it
• laws don’t allow certain types of disclosure
• there’s a lack of resources with which to create, write and maintain a blog
• there’s no appetite for managing comments

Some choose to blog without allowing comments. But that flies in the face of one of the underlying goals of new social media — to provide for open, online dialogue and discussion.

At NewsCactus we recommend, if you’re going to blog, that you moderate comments. Have a comment moderation policy posted, and follow it. That way everyone knows the rules up front.

For companies that just can’t justify blogging, there is another solution. One that yields the same search engine optimization and marketing benefits. One that doesn’t require comment moderation. And one that doesn’t even require too much additional work creating fresh content.

That solution: a corporate newsroom.

Newsrooms are an often underutilized Web resource and public relations tool.

Most people (like C-level executives) now accept that journalists expect an online newsroom. They expect 24/7 access to the standard fodder — like press releases, executive biographies, company background information and perhaps multimedia files like photos and logos.

An online newsroom can go a long way to actually free up the time of corporate communicators and public relations professionals. When you put pertinent background information online, with a press release archive, the media doesn’t have to contact the PR person to get simple requests taken care of or questions answered.

Additionally, most companies are already producing press releases. Once they’re approved, in addition to being distributed to the media, they should be posted online.

But not just archived by year in a chronological list of announcements. They should be searchable. They should be linked to an RSS feed, applicable links to additional resources and multimedia files. They should be share-able through social media. And even better, they should be categorized into types of news (something we’re working on for the next version of NewsCactus).

Done properly, an online newsroom provides a company with the perfect vehicle to share its news without having to create an authentic blogger voice and manage comments.

Through properly structuring the release URLs and including behind-the-scenes keywords and descriptions, a newsroom can support a company’s main Web site in search results. The more platforms you manage, the better your chances of controlling more of what we online marketers call the Google Golden Triangle.

31 percent cited a company blog.

Having a corporate newsroom augments information on a Web site and certainly better positions a company to respond to information, and misinformation, in times of crisis.

This mirrors the digital trend away from printed resources to online resources.

An online newsroom is a pivotal piece of the online data puzzle.

The release format would include:

• Contact information
• Headline
• Sub-heading
• Dateline
• Lead sentence/paragraph
• More details
• Quote
• Boilerplate

For a variety of reasons, this format is becoming ‘old school.’

Everyone is busy, including journalists. New press release formats get to the point faster and highlight key points easily. They also include links to supporting resources and accompanying multimedia files.

The social media release is gaining popularity, as well as housing your corporate news in a social media newsroom.

The NewsCactus online newsroom is equipped with social media bookmarking functionality. Its modules and additional links also fit the bill for social media releases.

A social media release is designed to be more authentic, to create a dialogue and provide open access to information by anyone. It should foster and support a sense of community.

A social media release should include:

• Contact information
• Headline
• Sub-heading
• Quick facts
• Multimedia elements
• Dateline
• Lead sentence/paragraph
• More details
• Quote
• Boilerplate
• Keywords
• Tags/bookmarks

And when you write a release, stick to the conventional wisdom in KISS — keep it simple stupid. More often than not, less is more. Write so the announcement is something you’d actually be interested in and read if you were someone else. Don’t use industry jargon or buzz words, rather write in language that’s easily accessible for your intended audience, and be sure you know who that audience is when you set out.

If you’re a business communicator and you’re writing press releases without much thought as to who would search for your release, and what words they’d use to find it, it’s time to change.

With the digitization of information, companies who provide search mechanisms have become huge conglomerates (i.e., Google). Most of us no longer pull a printed directory to search for information, we go online and do a search. We Google it.

Thus, as communicators, it behooves us to write so that our information can be found, quickly and easily in online searches.

Here are a couple of handy tools to help you know what keywords people are searching for and what keywords you could incorporate into your news releases to help secure higher search placement:

Google Trends

Keywords at Wordtracker

It’s true — Microsoft Word is evil when it comes to being transferred to the World Wide Web. Word encodes the text, which messes with the way it’s published on the Web.

The best solution we’ve found is to take your Word document, copy the text, paste it into Notepad or some other type of plain text program, then copy the text from Notepad and paste it into your browser window.

In version 1.1 of NewsCactus we created a new tool button to provide for copying from Word and pasting directly into the NewsCactus administrative page. This omits the step originally required of going from Word to Notepad to your NewsCactus admin site.

But a word to the wise: when your document is in Word, always go through a plain text editor (like Notepad) before pasting the text onto the Web. Chances are you’ll need to follow this procedure for WordPress and other types of blogs, unless you elect to compose inside those programs.