5 Ways to Make Your Corporate Newsroom Social
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Corporate news content isn’t very social by nature; historically, this includes some text-heavy press releases, maybe an earnings report, topped off with some ‘talking head’ videos. All is not lost. With a few simple (and some obvious) steps, you too can make your corporate news content social. Here are just 5 steps that we took for our corporate newsroom.
1. Facebook Fan Page/Twitter Handle – Setting up a Facebook Page and Twitter account should be one of the first things you create (after amazing content). Distribute your content by placing it in a Facebook post and/or Tweet to let the sharing and engagement begin.
- We currently manage the @CiscoSystems Twitter handle (38k+ followers) and the Cisco Facebook Fan Page (101k+ fans).
2. Youtube – Almost all of the Cisco PR videos can be found on our Youtube channel. The viral possibilities, search engine rankings, and ease of use make it a must use tool.
- We currently house almost 900 videos on Youtube with 1.5M views and counting.
3. Flickr – Flickr allows us to easily upload and embed our photos within our news content. In the end, Flickr increases our SEO, makes our photos social and creates another entry point for our news site.
- We currently share 784 photos with 1.3M+ views.
4. Social Sharing buttons – Social Sharing buttons give readers the ability to take our content and recommend it to their network which is essential in getting our message across a multitude of networks.
5. Live Streaming Video – Live streaming sites, in our case, Ustream, has created an environment that magically transforms our “talking head” executive videos into a fresh, engaging and insightful dialogue, driven by social media.
- We have currently reached over 41,000 views on this new platform. Watch this quick video about Talk2Cisco to learn more about the program:
What’s next for our corporate newsroom?
We are currently looking to incorporate commenting, virtual badges, and mobile development in our efforts to become the premiere example of the next-gen corporate news site (spoiler alert: redesign coming soon!). If you have any suggestions please let us know your thoughts on our social media efforts thus far and how we can improve.
- What seems to be working, or not, for you?
- Most importantly, where do you think we should go from here?
Any and all comments are welcome and, as always, feel free to connect with me on Twitter @arom1000.
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22 Comments
All these are good tools to use social media to you SEO advantage. I wonder how you keep this from becoming the primary focus of your employees.
how about digg? 😉
We have the option to share to Digg via our ShareThis button but Digg use is mainly user preference. Meaning that if our content gets “Dugg”, it’s because our readers have made it so and not because we pushed it there. Do you have any examples of how Digg has been used on other sites? I’m always interested to see case studies.
You guys forgot one thing … Ellen page !
Seriously … where is she ?! 😀
Cisco’s blogs are simply the best. We were using 3/5 and when suggested the other two to my boss, well lets just say it was a positive suggestion. Thanks Alex.
In my environment, this is still not common practice. But I hope that it will soon become. For now I can only expect boring and long texts that I can not even read. I totally lose interest. Practical and interesting solution is to get updates through Twitter or photo updates via Flicker. This is the way to go. Thank you for great tips.
Hats off to Cisco, looks like the Communications team is working very hard to provide dozens of ways of staying in touch.
thankyou for interesting tips,this is great.
We have been trying to use some of these too, thanks for the tips Alex. nice one.
useful and has been a recent editorial article I’ll try what you say in my country stood to this day thanks to the ban on YouTube
We have been implementing all these as well. The most difficult portion was getting acceptance from within first and foremost. The climb has been slow but am confident that once our org will get on board the whole company will benefit. I believe purpose is the most important factor in getting anything going.
Buy in is always tough. Try to find good use cases from other companies in or outside your field. Also, set up mock accounts so the higher ups can see what the service looks and feels like, sometimes it’s hard to visualize through just words and a bar graph. I had to set up dummy accounts/pages for Flickr, Facebook, and Ustream in order to get them signed off on. So this is a practice I would definitely recommend.
I’ve never seen much results from social sharing buttons either, but I guess it all comes down to how many visitors you have. Even if only a small percentage shares the stories, it can snowball quickly once you get it rolling.
I’m sure the effectiveness of social sharing buttons varies greatly from site to site. Our aim is to make sharing as simple and easy as possible. We’d hate to have an article/video/etc not shared because it’s not easy or obvious enough.
try to use foursquare as your another social media target guys, it helps you more to see potential clients around office or any information from their platform..
good luck..
You make valuable points. We have resisted Social Media around here but are finding it to be of benefit even to a much smaller business than yours.
Social media can be a benefit to businesses of all sizes when done correctly. I think many would argue that it has a bigger impact on smaller businesses.
Still you need allot of time to handles all these platform so it will have any effect on your followers or friends.
@herbs – You’re 100% right, social media does take time and patience. If you have limited resources you should decide what platforms will have the biggest impact on your business and go from there. As the saying goes, Rome was not built in a day.
Thanks very good tips, but IMO people don’t share stories through social sharing buttons. These are useful though.
Alex it is just nice content, I have already created a FB fan page and Twitter account, After reading this now i’m going to create Flicker account and YouTube. Thanks for the details..
Very useful tips Alex. You make it sound so easy … We ll think about this …