FB Fan Pages vs. online newsrooms: The rebuttal
Record breaking response to my blog post earlier this week about Facebook Fan Pages and how they compare to online newsrooms.
The were also a number of comments including from some in the online newsroom business who are friends of THP. In the spirit of providing equal time, here are two of the comments from experts in the online newsroom field.
The first is from Eric Schwartzman who created iPressroom. We actually had Eric come to Richmond about a year ago for a social media bootcamp from THPers. In his blog post, Eric talks about the place for both fan pages and online newsrooms in the online communications mix.
We also heard from Steve Momorella of TEKgroup, his comments are included below. While there was no intention on my part to minimize the service that Eric and Steve’s companies offer, I do think a dialog on social marketing content and tools – especially since they are changing daily – is healthy. These offerings should be reviewed on a regular basis to make sure they fit into your and your client’s or company’s marketing mix. Here’s Steve…
Jon,
Thanks for your post. I agree with the rest that Facebook, and its 175,000,000 people, are a great distribution outlet for your PR and marketing activities at Hodges.
In today’s economic environment, everyone can appreciate the need to reduce costs and use your PR and marketing dollars wisely; however, below are some reasons that you may want to consider sticking with your Online Newsroom and leveraging it to help expand your social media initiatives.
Branding
With Facebook you really have no control over the look and feel and corporate imaging of your site. It is all very templatized (by design) and mixed together so that you are really unable to group and categorize your content into clear and easy to find sections – such as PR Contacts, Executive Bios, Featured Stories. You have very little control over the design of your site, the layout and placement of certain items, and the overall color. This is important and while Facebook has certainly come a long way over the years, the lack of control over your image is a big reason to still recommend a web presence.
Access
As mentioned in some of the above responses, with Facebook, people have to be members to fully engage with your Fan Page. Not everyone is on Facebook, and some reporters on deadline might not want to wait for the confirmation to gain full access to your site. Likewise, you are unable to password-protect any areas within your Facebook Fan Page. You are unable to embargo releases or photos, or create special areas for your “A list” journalists to have access prior to releasing to mainstream. Further, there are no publishing controls, such as providing the ability for one administrator to publish only to certain areas of the site, or to lock down certain areas from other administrators. These are all important aspects of your Online Newsroom, allowing you to provide all of your content to as many people as possible in an open way.
In going to your Facebook Fan Page, I noticed some photos. I saw one with “Caroline and Governor Kaine” but I only had access to the thumbnail image. If a journalist on deadline wanted to get a high-resolution version of that photo to place in their magazine, or wanted a larger image to use as the lead story in their blog, they would be unable to do so using the Facebook Fan Page photo gallery as it currently stands.
Distribution
This is one of the most critical aspects of your Online Newsroom. You are able to send emails to your media contact database directly from your Online Newsroom. You can not easily just email your video or audio or image or press release to a built-in list of journalists or influencers on Facebook. There is very limited distribution out to Google Search, Yahoo Search, Google News, Yahoo News, and several of the top social media outlets such as Digg and Delicious. There is very little Search Engine Optimization for your content since you are in a closed network with little control over the URL, Title pages, and META keyword tags. You are also unable to maintain distribution lists from within Facebook of targeted key influencers – analysts, editors, government relations, bloggers, consumers, employees – whereas with your Online Newsroom you have the full ability to maintain your media contact database.
Monitoring and Tracking
Probably the single most important reason to maintain an Online Newsroom is the ability to report on your activity. How many press releases are being downloaded and by whom? How many press kits were downloaded last month? How many times were videos downloaded? There are no site metrics showing Time Spent on Site, User Sessions, Page Views, and there is also no tracking of how many email distributions were sent out. Facebook really offers little, if any, tracking and site metrics reporting which is critical in determining the success (or failure) of your campaigns.
Related Assets
With Facebook’s publishing facility you are not really able to incorporate all aspects of a social media press release. Each asset in Facebook is part of its own area – photos, videos, notes, etc. – and can not easily be combined to create an actual press kit or informational page that would contain text, links, photos, and video all in one place, all related to a particular event or show. With Facebook, you can create a photo gallery and a video gallery, but you can not easily integrate and embed photos and videos into a press release. This is important as journalists and the general public want to see everything about a particular topic all in one place.
These are just some quick examples that I thought of off the top of my head. There are certainly others that center around credibility, stability, and security that are also important, but I don’t want to take up too much of everyone’s time.
In closing, while I think that Facebook (and LinkedIn and Twitter) are extremely important and help you meet some of your objectives, utilizing your Online Newsroom as a communications portal to manage all of your press materials, media contacts, and social media outlets gives you the flexibility, branding control, and security that you need.