Redefine Your Online Newsroom

I was in a meeting with a product marketer today, let’s call him “Ed.” It was an informative and informal (interesting how those two usually go hand-in-hand) presentation about his world, his business, his market and his product — let’s call it “Venus” — and how we, in corporate communications, can help.

Ed comes from a business unit that my department has struggled to break of an addiction to press releases.

As Ed described his market, how their efforts were segmented to best penetrate the areas deemed most profitable, and who they were competing with, I began to understand his world a little better, and I began to see some possibilities.

Venus has a decent market share of a market in which there is one other product produced by another large corporation, and many small products that are often the sole product of small businesses. As it turns out, those small businesses use their size to their advantage, namely in the churning out of press releases.

Because Venus is one product in a large corporation made up of many businesses and many products, they are required to abide by the corporation’s rules about press releases, rules that my department is left to enforce at times. The rules of the corporation dictate that small feature releases do not warrant a press release, nor do upgrades in technology, buying a new server, signing a $50,000 contract, or any number of things which they would love to announce to the media, but which they can’t, and which their competitors do all the time.

Customers read this news from the competition in the trade pubs or on their list servs or hear about it from the competition’s sales reps and they go to Venus’ Web site and click on the “news” link to see if they too have announced such a thing recently but all that’s on the news page is the corporate-permitted releases. Not very many of them, and about news much larger than the release of a new small feature.

So Venus’ sales reps go into these customers’ and the customers say, “Well, competitor X just announced feature Y… do you have that feature?” The rep says, “Yes, in fact we launched feature Y eight months ago, and have actually since enhanced it with Z.”

It’s a big hassle and puts the reps on the defensive and all manner of bad things, which, to some degree, negatively impact revenue. (Which, by the way, brings me to a joke that Ed shared with us, “When I started in marketing, my boss at the time told me, ‘There’s one thing thing you need to know about sales reps, Ed… they’re coin-operated.”)

So, what is that news page missing on Venus’ Web site? More press releases about smaller news? Maybe, but that’s not going to happen as long as this huge corporation is worried about diluting itself and its message. What I think is missing is a blog. Or two.

The media would love it. There are reporters out there working for the trade pubs in this space who want to know every little thing, every little release. But they get hundreds of press releases. Give them RSS, let them “pull” the news they want, make them happy.

And let those customers, who live and work with this product every day, know everything that’s going on. Heck, you might even engage them a little bit so the next time a friendly sales rep from competitor X calls on them and says, “Well, we have feature F,” the customer won’t fire up their browser and go to look at Venus’ Web site to see if they have some sort of response. Instead, they might turn to the sales rep and say, “Yeah, but do you have a blog?”