NewsCactus Blog

There are many reasons not to blog, including:

• 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.

For those of you familiar with Web-based applications, TinyMCE and other tools that allow you to format text for the Web, you may have noticed frustrating abnormalities in text created in Word and pasted into Web applications.

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.

I’m participating in a conference presented by Ragan Communications and the Public Relations Society of America titled “Social Media for Communicators — A Web 2.0 Summit for Internal Communications, Public Relations and Marketing.”

A common thread of discussion is blogging. What is it? How do you do it? What are best practices?

The theme of the conference seems to be the idea that the Internet today is about two-way communication. Gone are the days of producing a fancy corporate Web site and calling it good for several years.

People today expect timely information, responses to industry trends and crises, and the opportunity to watch, listen and interact online.

Because of my experience in creating the NewsCactus online newsroom tool, I keep going back to the utility offered by the service. It really is similar to a blog a company can use to communicate with a key public, which in this case is the media.

In so doing, the company opens a dialog with journalists (and other interested parties) where it provides media rich content, additional links and drives the conversation.

NewsCactus uses RSS just like blogs. It also provides the tools communicators need to post timely information just like Blogger or WordPress or any other blogging tool. Once set-up, there’s no need to wait for IT to update content.

The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that companies that do not use an online newsroom are leaving out one of the easiest, simplest and most effective tools for communicating with journalists.

In fact, I believe online newsrooms will replace phone calls, faxes and e-mails as a journalist’s preferred method of receiving pitches from corporate communicators.

Web logs, commonly known as blogs, are unique tools for communicators because they’ve made it possible for everybody to publish online. Although blogging seems to lend a much more amateur tone to communications thanks to the abundance of self-publishing software, professional communicators have been successfully utilizing them to promote their organizations.

There are two types of corporate blogs: internal and external. 

Internal blogs

Internal corporate blogs are those accessible to company employees and usually available on company intranets. Although the decision as to who can and cannot contribute to the blog is up to the company itself, a communal approach, where anybody may contribute, can be an effective way to encourage employee participation, a sense of community, high morale and other factors.

Allowing employees at every level to contribute to your corporate blog creates an open atmosphere and can promote open discussion about corporate policies, direction, criticisms or suggestions. 

External blogs

The other type of corporate blog is an external blog. Although the blog is maintained and authored by corporate staff, it is viewable by anyone with Internet access. These can be used to make company announcements, share viewpoints, respond to news articles or any number of other communications. More importantly, utilizing a comment system allows an organization to interact directly with its audience in meaningful ways. 

Encourage audience discussion

Comments give your company instant feedback and can be used to measure of value for new products or services in your customers’ eyes. This interaction can also provide invaluable insight as to what your audience thinks, wants, needs or feels. Comment systems encourage discussion between visitors. The most successful blogs are those whose comment sections are much more active than the blog itself. While there isn’t any professional communicator who would argue that getting a message to an audience isn’t a success, blogs carry much more potential. Imagine the value of not just getting your message to your audience, but having such an impact on it that they consider and discuss it among themselves. Blogs can also be used to find and directly communicate with influencers within a company’s audience. Reaching opinion leaders and influencers has always been a goal of public relations and blogs allow communicators to do so much more easily than in the past. 

Give your perspective

Corporate blogs are undeniably biased, but they also have several advantages. First, corporations have complete control over the content of the site. That isn’t to say that the blog should focus on corporate strengths and ignore controversies. As a matter of fact, blogs are fantastic opportunities to address issues and concerns from the company’s perspective. Providing timely, honest views about potentially contentious issues can have a dramatic effect on public opinion and adds to an organization’s credibility. 

Executive blogs

Another type of very successful blog is the executive blog. These blogs are written by top officers in a corporation and offer readers a glimpse into the minds of the individuals they view as the chief decision makers in a company. Executive blogs not only give corporations a face, but it also makes them more human, which makes them more identifiable.

As superficial as it sounds, a well-liked CEO can completely change a company’s image. You only have to take a look at Steve Jobs and Apple to see an example.

More importantly, executive blogging positions your corporate officers as industry experts. Industry journalists use expert opinions to illustrate their stories; taking advantage of this need leads to increased coverage and visibility. 

Increase your reach

External corporate blogs also come with the added advantage of increased traffic and search engine rankings. Frequent updates add credibility and encourage visitors to return, which will help keep your search engine rankings high. Another good idea is to create an RSS feed for your blog.

RSS feeds automatically update users’ aggregators and alert them to new posts or bulletins on your blog. Essentially, rather than looking for new information, users have the information sent to them. As more people adopted the use of this technology, it is becoming increasingly important for companies to do the same in order to keep up with Internet trends.

Corporate blogs are powerful tools to reach your audiences. Several companies are already utilizing blogs and if you plan on keeping your company competitive, a corporate blog is a must have communications channel.