Private RSS Feeds and Social Media Newsrooms
If you know anything about building online press rooms, you’ll know it’s generally not a good idea to have it password-protected to ensure only journalists have access. The reason is pretty simple: journalists are too busy to be bothered with tracking down and storing the passwords. Shouldn’t any advances in the press room concept at least acknowledge the problems we already know about before offering up fancy schmancy changes to impress the tech geeks of the world?
Let’s face it. If a journalist is looking for more information on your company or website, and they stumble upon your press room only to see that they need to request a password for access, chances are that it’s easier to just find something else to write about. They won’t be bothered with it. So why the hell are people talking about taking a step backwards as far as “social media newsrooms” go? Let’s put our thinking caps on for a minute.
I was a bit disappointed to see a recent post on PR Squared (one of my favorite PR blogs despite my differences of opinion on social media in PR), talking about subscription RSS feeds for press access. This tool, a part of the social media newsroom template, is called the story syndicator. I get the opt-in “pull” tactic versus trying to “push” your news. But be realistic. Password protecting content for press access hasn’t been the best option in the past, and to the best of my knowledge the PR gods haven’t issued any new industry commandments like “Thou shalt make journalists’ lives a living Hell.”
I’m a bit sensitive to bad news distribution. Not only do I handle releases from the PR side of things for clients through my firm, but I’ve worked with some reasonably large online outlets where I’ve been hounded by lousy press releases on the press side as well. Even with my own network of sites, I can’t even begin to count how many crap releases I have to discard each day. So from someone who deals with news distribution on both sides of the fence, I’m saying with no uncertainty that password-protected RSS feeds as a “pull” alternative to press release distribution is complete nonsense.
It’s nice that everyone wants to jump on the Web 2.0 bandwagon, but not at the expense of some of the basic tenets of public relations (like ummm learning how to write well so your press releases actually have a shot at being picked up, worrying about having a solid news angle instead of just formatting any old crap to make it “pretty” for bloggers, etc.).
I certainly don’t expect social media to separate itself from the PR world. I just hope to hear some sense on the issue soon. The social media press release has been around for a while now, and it’s still got issues (another post for another day). Let’s worry about getting that right before we start pushing our clients into social media newsrooms and tools like the story syndicator.
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[…] I’ve already posted recently on one particular aspect of social media newsrooms, and why I see problems with this idea of a “pull” distribution to the news (with opt-in, password-protected RSS feeds). So I won’t delve deeper into that right now. The points here are specifically targeting the social media press release: […]