The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing, & Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly

Chapter 15. The Online Media Room: Your Front Door for Much More Than the Media

The online media room (sometimes called a press room or press page) is the part of your organization's Web site that you create specifically for the media. In some organizations this page is simply a list of news releases with contact information for the organization's PR person. But many companies and nonprofits have elaborate online media rooms with a great deal of information available in many different formats: audio, video, photos, news releases, background information, financial data, and much more. A close cousin to the online media room is the online Investor Relations room that many public companies maintain; however, I don't cover IR sites in this book.

Before I give you ideas on how to create a valuable online media room of your own, I want you to consider something that is vitally important: All kinds of people visit your online media room, not just journalists. Stop and really let that soak in for a moment. Your buyers are snooping around your organization by visiting the media pages on your Web site. Your current customers, partners, investors, suppliers, and employees all visit those pages. Why is that? Based on casual research I've done (I often speak about visitor statistics with employees who are responsible for their organizations' online media rooms), I'm convinced that when people want to know what's current about an organization, they go to an online media room.

Visitors expect that ...