Dynamic, collaborative and multimedia-friendly - no wonder GM Europe and other companies are switching onto social media newsrooms. Neil Gibbons reports:

It’s September 2007 and, at the Frankfurt Motor Show, GM Europe is hoping to get tongues wagging with an exciting new launch. It’s not its eyebrow-raising Opel E-Flex concept car, also launched that week; in fact, it’s not even a car at all. It’s an entirely new way of communicating with stakeholders that could streamline the sharing of key corporate information for Web 2.0 – a social media newsroom.

The newsroom, at www.gmeurope.info, was actually completed in March of that year but its official launch was held back to coincide with the gathering of the world’s motoring media in Germany. And, with GM Europe one of the earliest adopters of this type of press centre, it was certainly newsworthy.

“At that time, I think we were the first pan- European multinational company to make such a move,” recalls Keith Childs, GM Europe’s manager of web and new media.

It’s not been the last, though. Social media newsrooms (or SMNs) have sprung up to increase the functionality and usability of the traditional online newsroom. Previously, these were little more than repositories of web pages, often password-protected to keep out non-journalists. With content static and communications unidirectional, they harnessed little of the capabilities of social media.

SMNs, on the other hand, offer a more dynamic, open and flexible online experience and encourage dialogue and information sharing among a more diverse audience. In general, official content is accessible to not just members of the media, but to all those the company wishes engage with: prospects, customers, business partners, and investors. It gives these stakeholders access to news, public relations announcements, images, audio, video and other multimedia files.

“The SMN should include components that relate to the company’s social media channels and bridge the website to these channels,” says Gustaf Ekelund, senior consultant at strategic communications consultancy Hallvarsson & Halvarsson in Stockholm. “Components may include integration of sites such as Flickr, YouTube, Slideshare and Scribd as well as social networks. In addition it should be an aggregator of news sources ranging from press releases, news, blogs but also company-specific Twitter accounts.”

Ekelund believes companies should strive to give news items as much smart functionality as possible as to take full advantage of Web 2.0, including online translation and even geopositioning. “With all this, the newsroom becomes a good platform for visitors to get a specific story with all associated media formats,” he says. “The newsroom will also serve as a good tool for SEO if done correctly as it will spread content on several websites and media.”

But the big difference between traditional press centres and SMNs lies in the latter’s ability to facilitate collaboration and direct conversation with the audience. Most of them encourage readers to participate in open discussions and freely share their thoughts, feedback, and opinions about individual news releases and other available content.

The new social media newsroom allows organisations to more effectively interact with those who directly influence public perceptions and preferences. For example, quotes and comments from various company spokespeople that are published in blogs and other social media vehicles can be publicly tracked and monitored, then posted to the social media newsroom. This allows journalists and other site visitors to understand the company’s position on important and frequently-discussed industry issues, and to see what type of impact the company has on content across the web.

GM Europe’s objective was to make it easier for anyone to reuse its content – by downloading, sharing or republishing, says GM Europe’s Childs. “It’s primarily a tool for bloggers, online newsrooms and others who need easy access to photographs and multimedia content. All the material is under a Creative Commons licence.”

In fact, the newsroom was set up as part of a push by GM Europe to bolster its multimedia presence online. Shortly after it launched the social media newsroom, its introduced gmeurope.tv to provide more options than were available from YouTube. “In addition to sharing and embed options, we offer downloads in various file formats and make it easy to subscribe via RSS and iTunes.”

GM Europe was keen to disseminate content across the web and, although it allows users to comment on news and has created a Twitter feed for anyone preferring updates via Twitter to an RSS feed, it isn’t hung up on creating a dialogue.

“You open up a channel and let people comment or ask questions but it wasn’t our primary objective,” says Childs. “It is a tool to make it easier to get hold of our content. News is factual and facts don’t exactly encourage discussion and dialogue.”

Several other savvy firms are following suit and creating newsrooms that incorporate new media. In June, first direct became the first UK bank to launch a social media press centre. Six months in development, it can be found at www. newsroom.firstdirect.com.

“The site provides an area for us to post information from press releases, comments and links for people to hear and learn more about what’s going on at first direct,” says first direct’s PR manager Amanda Brown. Five months in, she admits to be “really impressed” with the results from the newsroom. “We regularly have around 2,000 visits to the site a week and we now have around 450 Twitter followers.”

US-based software and IT services company Cincom created its SMN (at http://newsoom.cincom. com) this summer and PR director Steve Kayser is already evangelical about its benefits. In his view, traditional newsrooms had come to be little more than “self-serving repositories of grandiose corporate gobbledygook and steroidal marketing fluff” with real news and information “hard to find, hard to understand and even harder to realistically use”.

His reason for creating the new newsroom was not just to provide the latest in company news. “It was also to provide easy access to helpful information, ideas, insights and even inspirations – for Cincom clients, prospective buyers, media, and industry analysts,” he says.

According to Kayser, the Cincom SMN hasn’t forgotten that its primary audience is likely to be the media. As such, a Media Resources section is located on the home page with one-click access to anything the media might need for a story: corporate fast facts, leadership information, a multimedia library, financial information, awards and other recent media coverage.

Furthermore, the SMN uses social media and web 2.0 sharing, tagging and commenting features. On it, readers can access and share content through video, audio soundbites, photos, widgets, social networking sites. But crucially, says Kayser, readers can give feedback through moderated online commentary. “One of the greatest values of a social media newsroom is the ability to connect with readers in real-time through their comments and feedback. They’ll tell you when you’re delivering real value – and they’ll also tell you when you’re blowing smoke.”

In these tough times, making the argument for a social media newsroom – another new tranche of the communications mix – might not be easy. But those who have already invested claim it’s a simple equation and the initial outlay isn’t too eye-watering.

“Are you kidding me?” says Cincom’s Kayser. “It’s extremely reasonable, embarrassingly low cost. And the IT department did not have to be involved except peripherally. PR and marketing control it.”

Gauging the return on that investment is, of course, somewhat inexact. Cincom is tracking a lot of metrics: visits, page views, length of time on site, how users found the site, the terms they used to find the site, repeat visitors.

“But the only real question when gauging success is, ‘Can it help your business?’” says Kayser. “If you provide useful, accurate, unique, specific information, good things can and will happen. The social media newsroom is not just for the media. It’s for the public as well — hence the description ‘social’.”

Back at GM Europe, Childs declines to get into a discussion about how the firm measures the SMN’s return on investment, but says: “Of course, we have metrics on the number of downloads and the number of times items were shared, but more importantly it’s led us to re-evaluate how we are communicating our news and the role of our media sites. It’s challenged our conventional wisdom. We stopped password protecting our photography. Not everyone agreed we should, but I think over time we have managed to prove it was the right step. Many of the social elements are being incorporated into our media sites. You’ll see social media news rooms and media sites merging.”

For first direct, it’s still very early days. “To date we’ve been monitoring the number of visits to the site because of the difficulties of knowing whether any online commentary has originated from traditional press or the newsroom,” says Brown. “The great thing about people visiting the site is that they’ll learn a lot more about everyday happenings at first direct because the news can be uploaded to the newsroom instantly and often the articles it contains have not been distributed to the media.”

Hallvarsson & Halvarsson’s Ekelund, meanwhile, sees merit in these straightforward metrics such as traffic and visibility on SERPs, but says drawing in stakeholders and encouraging them to immerse themselves in content is what’s most engaging: “I believe time spent with the company becomes more important,” he says. 

The SMN trailblazers
The other organisations also creating social media newsrooms:
Ford
http://ford.digitalsnippets.com/
Cisco
http://newsroom.cisco.com
Electrolux
http://newsroom.electrolux.com/
Scania
http://www.scanianewsroom.com/
US Telecom
http://www.ustelecom.org/Newsroom/