It's All About Content

Editor's Note: Today, Jeremy Pepper takes a look at the value of content. From many perspectives, content is still considered king. And why not? If you don't have good content, chances are you won't be able to secure advertising for your site, Google or otherwise.

• You can be the greatest corporation, but if your press room does not have the right content, reporters and analysts will go away with no pertinent information.
It's been a while since anyone has written about the state of online press rooms. Back in October 2003, Vocus study and the former Ben Silverman crowned PR Fuel Blog - the right content, the right contact information, the right mix. But, since those articles, the issue of online press rooms has taken a back seat to every corporation needs a blog. AAAH. And now, fast, stat! Of course, Dan Gillmor when he was with the open letter to PR people. He didn't want phone calls, but only email. And, in his PR would need to move to RSS feeds, abandoning email. From a PR standpoint, the chance to build a phone or face-to-face relationship is best, but you have to follow the reporters' wishes. In Dan's case, he wants emails / RSS feeds. You work with what you get - and hope that when you do have phone conversations, you build that relationship. But, with the inundation of SPAM in reporter's email systems, there needs to be a new system. And, with the advent of new technology, there are companies that out there to help either rebuild the online press room or work with PR firms and PR people to publish their news. The fact is that anyone that does not have everything going out in all the preferred channels that media outlets want - be it email, RSS feeds, or even podcasting - is failing to get the information to the public. That brings up to different strategies for corporations to take when it comes to news and RSS feeds: rebuild the online press room, or just publish RSS feeds. Building a press room iPressroom to redo their corporate Website, to showcase the celebrity outreach, the influencer marketing and the events that Newsweek, and Nick Wingfield of the Nooked makes more sense. Nooked is an RSS publishing service for corporations. The company publishes RSS feeds, helps extend the reach of those feeds, and provides measurement tools for the clients. It's the reporting and publishing aspects that are of the most interest to communicators. I have been wanting to interview Fergus Burns, the founder of Nooked for a while. But, then the interview, and got a lot of the answers I was looking for. But, it's hard to get companies to understand the need for RSS feeds. To prove this point, I took a look at the Cisco, Sun, United Online. That's a 10 percent adoption rate of new technology by technology companies. Which amazes me - there are so many people that are adopting RSS feeds just to combat the terror of SPAM. RSS is a way to get the information out there, and many of the default home pages are adopting it for their news. You have Yahoo has its My Yahoo with RSS feeds. Outlook is supposed to have a built-in RSS reader. The only surprising laggard is Jeremy Pepper is the CEO and founder of Musings from POP! Public Relations blog which offers Jeremy's opinions and views - on public relations, publicity and other things.