NewsCactus Blog

You’ve surely heard the expression word of mouth. But have you heard the expression word of mouse?

I first heard it from Park City Mountain Resort’s director of marketing and communications, Krista Parry (@krista_parry).

The concept is simple: word spreads these days like lightning through the Internet. Social networks carry messages to the edges of the Web, away from the central hub (i.e., a corporate Web site) to the outskirts, so-to-speak.

For a public relations practitioner, that’s the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The more you can get engagement from others and have them share your message, the more effective you’ll be.

Word of mouse is where it’s at!

So how does an online media room help with search placement?

If you’re creating press releases and distributing them directly to the media and/or through the news wires, and not publishing them yourself in an online newsroom, you’re missing one of the most effective public relations tools in our digital age.

You already have the content, why not display it in your own newsroom?

An online press room that includes social media sharing tools makes it easy for others to share your message on their sites, like blogs, Facebook pages, favorite YouTube channels, Digg, Delicious, etc.

Having our information on several Web sites gives you more tickets to the online search lottery. Just like buying more than one lottery tickets gives you a better chance of winning big, publishing your keyword rich content on dozens of sites gives you even more opportunities to control the first page of search results.

If you’re controlling most of the organic content in online search, you’re winning the online public relations battle.

How does an online newsroom save you money?

Consider this scenario:

In 2006 I had a PR client with about 10 company subsidiaries. We were distributing two to three press releases through various news wires each week. We were benefiting from placement of the announcements on a couple dozen news aggregate sites. But we weren’t publishing the releases online for each company and we were spending a few hundred dollars each week.

Their IT department was robust, but overworked. They had no capacity to accept the almost daily press releases and then code a Web page with the information on the various company Web sites. It was what I was pushing for, but it just wasn’t a possibility with their existing resources.

So I began searching for an online press room solution that we could subscribe to, which would allow me, their public relations counselor, to upload press releases and manage the online newsroom section of their sites.

What I found was only a handful of services all charging more than $1,000 a month for their service. Multiply that by 10 and it became an unrealistic proposition.

So I went to work to create a new solution. Through a close relationship with a Web development company, I created NewsCactus, a hosted, social media equipped online newsroom solution for public relations and marketing professionals.

We initially charged $200 a month for the service. It’s now only $99 a month.

At less than one hundred dollars a month, the NewsCactus online newsroom solution is affordable for just about everyone. And it does just what I described above . . .

It puts the power of publishing press release content directly in the hands of the public relations or corporate communications professional.

Of course, companies and organizations can create their own online newsroom page. Then there are design and maintenance costs. As well as time and money spent researching online press room best practices.

For many companies, in these tough economic times, doing more with less is the mantra. NewsCactus helps companies do just that. For a $99 a month subscription NewsCactus clients have access to a powerful, social media and multimedia equipped online newsroom solution.

Feel free to browse the NewsCactus client examples to see the online newsroom solution in action.