- Creating an Online Press Room
- What You Need in Your Online Press Room
- Determining Access to Your Press Room
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Determining Access to Your Press Room
A final determination to be made is who has access to your press room – and how easy that access is. You can make your press room open to all or closed to all except those with password access.
For what it’s worth, most companies make their online press centers freely available to all comers – traditional, journalists, non-traditional bloggers and their ilk, and the general public. To visit the press room, all a person has to do is click a link – typically found at the bottom of the company’s website home page.
Other companies, however, consider their press materials somehow proprietary and not suitable for use by the general public, and thus limit access to their online press materials. These companies don’t feature an obvious link to the press room on their sites and instead rely on their PR staff to dole out the URL – and accompanying password – only to approved journalists.
There are multiple drawbacks to having a closed online press room, not the least of which is the issue of controlling access. Who decides who gets in and who doesn't? How does an interested journalist gain access? (Typically by emailing the contact and getting a password in return – but how do you know who to contact in the first place?) How fast can a journalist get access to the site? Issues abound.
I’m a fan of open online press rooms. There shouldn’t be anything in your press room that you wouldn’t want your customers to see, so why not let them have access, too? Make it easy for the press to write about you – and feature pretty pictures of your products – by making your online press room open and easily discoverable.