Several years ago it became apparent to the team at Technical Marketing Ltd that much of the content for a company web site was pretty much static. The products, services and stuff about the company itself, didn't really change that much, or that often. What did change was news.
News can be about company results, investments, acquisitions, appointments, contract wins and projects. Or new product announcements, exhibitions, events, market research findings and comment on industry issues. The problem we recognised is that the PR people who were schooled in copy deadlines, embargo dates and other timing issues didn't run the web site. The IT guys did web sites and often it was pretty low on their priority list as well. If they had to fix payroll software then it could be a couple of weeks before they got round to posting news items if they bothered at all.
All that changed, for our clients at least, when we rolled out the Virtual News Office. With a VNO, stories could be published online as soon as they were ready to go. In fact every story can be published rather than end up in some editor's waste bin. Although our goal at the time was to provide a service that got company news accessible through the company web site we soon realised it was also getting indexed by search engines and because the news story actually resides on the VNO server it was creating relevant links to the company web site, in turn improving ranking of that site.
I have written before on the inevitable shift of emphasis from print to Internet as the place where news is published and consumed. The print business model based on advertising revenue and free distribution is under threat and many publications now charge for news publication and in doing so forfeit editorial control over the news pages. Not only does this degrade quality, but some magazines now resemble a notice-board patchwork of press releases. Whatever journals do they cannot match the immediacy of the Internet. However the sustainable business model for online aggregated news sites is taking time to emerge, as generally these sites offer free news and have no subscription revenue. Interestingly, in the industrial and engineering sectors, industry web sites that are mainly news oriented, or as someone called it today - 'news bearing' - are emerging as important resources for enquiries for engineers or architects.
Because such industry sites contain so much relevant content about a product category an engineer searching for a component will most likely find the that site higher up the search results than any one manufacturer of that component. So what he reads initially is a press release that in turn provides links to the supplier. And online aggregated new sites are becoming more selective, only publishing interesting news and carefully monitoring how many hits each attracts. The most popular news suppliers find their news items featured and fed to Google News and other participating sites. So this trend once again emphasises the importance of news creation and news delivery and increasingly as a direct source of sales leads.
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