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.