I've been reading the excellent eBook by Todd Defren of Shift Communications and talking it up with people at work.
We've all been witnessing the inexorable thinning out of the news print media. If you're looking for practical examples and reasons why your own news page is the new newsroom, download Todd's eBook and you'll find plenty of reasons to believe it and ways to do it.
If you have a blog, chances are you already have a news room filled with links to slides you've created and uploaded on SlideShare, photographs you shared on Flickr, links and micro-thoughts you posted on Twitter, as well as videos from YouTube - you get the idea. With flash software or iMovie, a Flip video camcorder, and a bit of patience, you could be producing pretty nice multimedia footage in no time.
There's a whole strategy you could employ with Delicious tags and your news releases. Take that a step further and, as Todd describes, you'll be able to do some outreach through that tool. Context matters a great deal - that's why content marketing is becoming more and more important. I would be remiss if I didn't mention the work that Joe Pulizzi put towards the content marketing community directly and by producing and curating the Junta42 list.
The best part of your news room could be the testimonials or comments from the people who have seen you speak at events.
Some reasons why you should do it:
- Your target audience is more fragmented than ever, you need a distributed approach
- You want to provide customers and prospect with ways to have a conversation
- When you integrate the news part with the quality content part, you become a destination
- You have an opportunity to build context around content created for disparate media
- Most importantly, you now have something to talk about in your outreach
The question now is - are you going to do it?
[congratulations to Brian Solis for the 2009 Semmys for the Conversation Prism]