If you look down the left side of this page you will see blog rolls from other writers including the new VCU Brandcenter Managing Director Kelly O'Keefe. The other blogs are from folks who I follow and have learned a great deal from on Twitter.
One of those smart people is Amber Naslund, the Director of Community for Radian6. Folks at THP can't wait to meet Amber and lots of other smart people at Blog Potomac in a couple of months.
It is one of those movie scenes you never forget. The one in Risky Business. Now, not Tom Cruise in the underwear singing Bob Seger. The other one. The one with the interview with the Princeton guy when the party is going on. The one that changes Joel's life. (click on the box and remember)
Starting and running a small business is all about taking risks. Just the act of starting a business is a risk all to itself. You can manage it conservatively, adding business and people along the way. We have great respect for our friends and peers in Richmond who have done it, whether it was at about the time when we did, like the folks at Elevation Advertising, or more recently when John Sarvay opened up his facilitation practice called Floricane.
In the past seven years for my business partner (the unflappable Josh Dare) and me at THP, that "adding the people" time usually comes about mid-year each year. We look at our book of business, how hard people are working, our physical space and then we bite the bullet.
The cumulative effects have been positive. We have grown in revenue and in people each year. Most of our clients at least don't hate us, we do good work, and aside from the strange issue of employees' husbands dragging them off to Seattle (long stories), we've had little turnover and great people, our employees, watching our backs.
Three years ago we became partners in a building that allows for expansion (more on that to come), so we have room to grow.
This year, things are feeling a bit different, and that annual risk taking moment is a very different one, one I think that will change our business in many potentially exciting and scary ways.
First, is this expansion of traditional public relations into the social marketing realm. While this is leading to many great opportunities for us, there is no guarantee that this trend will continue or that we will figure out its magic formula, although initial returns look promising.
Second, rumor has it that the economy is not exactly solid, although business for us has been good and the forecast is promising. We are always big believers in never taking the foot off the new business pedal and that has served us well.
Third, we have maxed out in our first floor space and while we can expand to the second floor, this will trigger a major commitment financially, some immediate investments and some over time. The payoff will be great but the road getting there more than bumpy.
Finally, we may decide that one hire is not enough. This may be the time to take the quantum leap. I have talked about content fueling the social marketing engine and we will need at least one content provider and equipment to create the content. We also need some account management support at both senior and junior levels. This will have an additional cultural impact in the business that we're not taking lightly.
I created this blog as a diary of sorts to record my journey from traditional public relations to a new PR or social marketing or marketing across the board world. Part of that world is growth. Some of that growth might be frightening and some exciting.
I frankly don't know what our final decisions on all this will be. I can tell you that when we make them, we usually do them without regrets and without looking back. It is the only way we know, and we have been successful that way. This decision may change things at our agency geometrically and things may never be quite the same in both good and not-so-good ways.
My sense is however, that it is time to take the risk, to play offense when others are playing defense.
If we're successful our business will be different next year than it is now, maybe very different.
If we're not, its probably "University of Illinois."
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.
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.
I could only spend about an hour with them because of family commitments, but I was about to sit in and listen to final presentations on digital or social marketing projects the group had been asked to collaborate on.
The interesting thing is that just a month earlier most of these students were just using Facebook to talk amongst themselves and not as a PR tool. At the direction of their professors, the students had spent the last month diving full force into the world of social marketing. The results were impressive. The traditional PR world better watch out.
As a result I find myself reflecting on the first four months of this blog as it chronicles our journey from "old" to "new" public relations/social marketing. I, and some of the folks at work with at THP, were just like these students. And while we have not for one second abandoned the traditional public relations that we know and love and pays our bills, we have embraced this new ingredient as well.
And we are about to put it to good use for a great cause - education. It is rare that I use this space for client work, at least directly, but this time I will make an exception. This week, THP and our friends at Siddall, Inc. are helping Virgnia's Community College's launch "Virgnia's Education Wizard," a great online tool that will help Virginia's high school students and those who are without a job and need retraining, get a handle on their next career and education moves.
At www.vawizard.org someone can take two assessment tests to figure out what careers they are interested in, what jobs are available in those fields, what kind of education it will take to get those jobs, how much the education will cost and how to parlay two years at a community college into a cost-effective college education.
For us, it is a project that allows us to throw the entire PR kitchen sink, including the latest social marketing tools, out there and see how successful we can be. From launching a six-city tour with Virginia's Governor Tim Kaine on Wednesday to the creation of Facebook fan pages and a Twitter persona based on the portal's tour guide, Ginny (please follow @ginnywiz and join us as we live tweet on Wednesday starting at around 11:30am), we are using all the old and new tools to reach students, parents, guidance counselors, business people and politicians.
We ask you to join in and follow us along the way. If you want, please spread the word, become a fan, send a link, watch the media coverage and most importantly tell us how you think we are doing. We will be sending updates from theworld famous THP Fan page as well (don't you just love the new format, btw?)
At the end of the day, just like the students at VCU, the only way we can truly learn how and if all this stuff works is by doing it and having fun.
Thin crust or thick, Coke or Pepsi, Michael or LeBron, Tiger vs. (okay, no debate there)...these are some of the great debates of our time. In recent days as social marketing has exploded another one is emerging, is it better to start and nurture a Facebook Group or a Facebook Fan page.
When I first dove into Facebook for our business not that long ago, I did it like many things I do in live, with a lot of gusto and not a lot of research. I immediately started a group page for THP and reveled in the number of folks that joined and started trying to interact with them. Most of the time the "gusto approach" works for me. Sorry to say this time it did not.
I quickly discovered how limited Groups were in helping me accomplish my goals. I wanted to post video, audio, share things like news clips, provide non-intrusive updates, as people to provide feedback, etc. While Groups allow you to do some of those things, they do not provide flexibility and even worse, they do not allow you to add apps to help.
Then I discovered Fan pages. They are less intrusive, allow you most of the same control that Group pages do and allow you to add many cool applications and add ones of your own that you can learn to do or hire someone to create.
If you remember the old George Carlin "Football vs. Baseball" routine, I find the similar differences between Group and Fan pages. Groups are more formal and bulky, Fans are more informal, fun and flexible.
As if this wasn't enough to convince me, I recently learned from my new favorite blog, Inside Facebook, that Fan pages are about to go through a radical re-design that will mimic personal profile pages. In this re-design, Fan pages will even be able to have their status updated like personal pages and updates will be posted on Wall, etc. Read about the coming changes here.
This clincher makes the Fan Page the potential smarter choice for those looking to promote a business, etc.
We will keep an eye on these developments and I hope it answers the question for all the folks who have asked, "Why did you switch from a Group Page to a Fan Page."
Would love to get some feedback on your Facebook experiences.
I've has so many conversations recentlyabout the intersection of public relations and social marketing, ranging from official presentations to casual chats over lunch, I've begun losing count. They have been as helpful for me in helping me crystallize a point of view as I hope they have been for friends and clients who we are either working with, working for, or hopefully will be working with and for in the near future.
The ultimate bottom line for me in all of this is that to make this work in the long run, CONTENT will be king.
In the late 90's the great race was to develop a website. Everyone had to have one. So when you finally got one it was like the Grizwolds in the original "Vacation" movie when they finally made it to the Grand Canyon. The stood there, put their arms around each other, took a deep breath, looked at it natural beauty....and then quickly got back in the car and moved onto the next thing. In the case of the website, it was having that same scene in front of the monitor and then beginning to design the second website.
I'm sensing the same "flavor of the month" fervor that we need to try to avoid.
Social marketing is for the long haul. It is about building meaningful relationships. Just building your Facebook fan page, creating a Twitter persona, firing up Flickr and YouTube channels are great but they are not the end as is the case with the average website, they are just the beginning.
So content and the planning, writing, editing and executing of it in a planned, measured but at the same time adjustable and dynamic way will be the long haul play and where the ultimate opportunity lies. I've been experimenting with this approach on the THP Facebook fan page (please become a fan) and it is still a work in progress.
I'm sensing partnerships between clients and their social marketing counselors instead of the "we can do it all for you approach."
Can we write blog posts for clients, yes. Should we do that, I'm thinking no because of a lack of authenticity. Can we "tweet" for them, yes...but we need a mixture of the interesting facts that Peter Shankman talked about in his Richmond talk and the authority that only someone close to the information can provide.
On Facebook, can we plan out well thought out information campaigns like media relations campaigns with information including pictures and video that changes on a regular basis, yes. But only if we are disciplined enough to commit to changing that content regularly, making it informative and valuable to the audience and then encourage that audience to share in the content and conversation.
This will take a partnership and consulting approach from the social marketing counselors who will work as content managers and collectors but also an understanding from the client that they to have to make this commitment as well. They will need to identify folks to will help provide the content and meet their counselors in the middle.
This will help both sides. The investment of time and money on the client side while important will not be overwhelming and overly expensive, and for the counselor it will mean while they might not be able to buy the new condo at the beach, they will be able to have a sustainable business model.
The final challenge for both sides will be to find the cost-effective way to produce that content. High-end audio and video costs a lot of money and in some cases Flip cameras won't cut it. The middle ground may be the best place to play and ability to produce at least some of that content in house is something I know we're seriously considering.
It's a bit of a gamble and the ultimate question about social marketing and ROI is still to be answered. But if content is king then it may be a gamble worth taking.
I welcome your thoughts on this matter as it helps us more than you will ever know. Thanks.
Based on the number of college students we meet with for internships and jobs I have been concerned about the quality of education being offered by some college public relations programs. Many times the folks we meet with just don't seem to "get it." They don't seem to have the public relations acumen and general go-getter attitude we need at THP and I assume others need as well.
One of my other criticisms is that they are often taught by folks who are not now, nor have they for a while, been active PR practitioners. They seem to be walking out of many programs with an education that is out of date on day one.
This is very important as today those of us who hire are looking for these folks to teach us about how and from where they get their news. They are important to those of us who are learning about social marketing because they have "lived" it for a lot longer than we have. They knew Facebook before Facebook was "cool" to us in the over-40 set.
(Shout outs also to Anna's colleague, Soo Yeon Hong and fellow serial Twitterer Adam Gainer ( @againer )
First of all, at VCU (Anna told us later), faculty is encouraged to freelance and consult thus making sure their own skills are up to date. Most of the students in the program hold down jobs at the same time and therefore have respect for and knowledge of the working world, something that is critical since in many cases we are asked to solve business problems not just communications problems.
Second and more important, the class project they are working on is a REAL case study of a REAL business. Not only that, they are partnering with their colleagues in a parallel advertising class to bring an additional level of real world experience to their project. In many cases, PR firms collaborate with ad agencies to bring "integrated" solutions to the table for clients. By teaming up, these students are learning both and good and bad things that can happen in this marriage. For example, battling over messaging, planning, budgets, who will take the lead, the misunderstanding of what each specialty does well and doesn't do so well, all of these things come to a head when these disciplines come together.
Having worked as a PR practitioner at one of Ad Age's top ten ad agencies and working with a number of ad agency partners on a daily basis, I can tell you first hand that these challenges can be met but it does take experience, a willingness to listen, and the strength to stand up for the client and for your discipline.
On the social marketing side some interesting sidelights:
When I asked how many of them were personally using "social marketing platforms, only a few raised their hand. But when I asked how many were on Facebook all of them did. A reminder to keep the formal vernacular out of the conversation and to keep it simple.
Facebook beat MySpace and Twitter is on the come but not there yet in this class of 30 or so.
When I proudly was about to launch into the "David Gregory ( @ davidgregory) responded to my Tweet last night" story, I asked first "how many of you know who David Gregory is." Not one person raised their hand. Obviously, the new host of NBC's Meet the Press needs to do more to court the 20-something demo.
While we spent most of our time doing our favorite campaign presentation (our stellar long-time work for Snagajob.com, work mainly done by folks that we've hired to make us look good), we did do a little on social marketing. My sense there is that while this group has been on SM platforms in the personal life, they are only now beginning to tap into how it can become a part of their burgeoning professional lives.
Is it in this area, that I challenge them and the PR educators to bring them up to speed and quickly. We in the working world are not only looking to these folks to bring their ambition to the table so they can help us, we are also looking to learn FROM them as well. The more they know about social marketing and how it reaches people like them and their age, the more value it can bring them (and us) as they enter a pretty tough job market in the days and months to come.
This is about to sound like an AA meeting, but I began serious blogging, facebooking and Twittering about two months ago. I am now approaching my first thousand followers on Twitter (nowhere need the social marketing God that is http://www.madisonmain.blogspot.com/tter) and I'm pretty happy about that.
Recently some of the social marketing folks that I follow blogged about what their "Day in the life of social marketing" is about and while I don't think my experience is worth emulating, I have noticed significant changes in my online habits and experiences. So what the hell, I thought I'd share.
First and foremost, I not only have Outlook open on my computer at all times for email and calendar purposes but my Facebook page is now open all the time as is my Twitter app of choice "Tweet Deck." I find myself checking on all of those on a regular basis for not only personal reasons but for business as well. As I'm writing this as a matter of fact, I just got two Twitter DM's and a Facebook email in addition to my normal email traffic.
I am starting to use all of these platforms on an interchangable basis and am finding myself more productive while sometimes a bit overloaded.
As with most, I tend to use LinkedIn less, more as a rolodex and a way to connect. I am using the new status function but more to promote this blog than anything else.
The blog experience has also been eye-opening. More than a few folks have asked how I have time for the blog as well. I guess the answer is, I'm just making time. As with most, an idea germinates and I'm the type of person who once they have an idea, has to get it out of my brain quickly or else my head will hurt.
I'm still in the process of self-teaching things like blog promoition, tags, feed platforms, etc. I have been blown away by local folks in Richmond like John Sarvay, Kelly O'Keefe and Adam Gainer and Twitter friends like John Sternal, Shonali Burke and Julie Bonn Heath who have linked back and mentioned me in their blogs.
Bottom line, I find that if you are talking to clients or potential clients about this stuff it helps if you can speak from experience. I hope to keep listening and learning and offer that real world experience to clients, friends and co-workers as best I can.
Please comment below on your social marketing habits and experiences as well. Thanks.
As you probably can imagine, I have been thinking a lot about social marketing in the wake of Peter Shankman's visit and our event. The "thinking" has been helped along by a follow-up presentation by the wonderful Shonali Burke in a presentation to a client in Northern Virginia on Wednesday and by meetings and conversations with others including other clients over the course of the last few days.
While the good wishes and good thoughts from others keep coming our way, so does the reality of how exactly to use this new information in the daily practice of PR and marketing and how it meshes with existing (and new) business and clients. There are a number of barriers to break through, most of them minor and surmountable, but they are there and must be navigated if we are to incorporate this new tool into our daily marketing lives. Here is a list in no particular order:
Colleagues: You might be basking in the warm glow of new understanding, but others may not. Either they don't understand or want to, or they are concerned that if you can't do it correctly out of the box then it will have a negative effect on your company. Those concerns are valid so teach those who want to be taught and ask others to be patient with you as you experiment.
Some people may never get it: There are some organizations and clients that are just not built for social marketing yet. Barriers here include the lack of patience or understanding of technology to concerns about privacy and legal issues. That's okay, not everyone bought the last media relations campaign you tried to convince them to do either. Work first with folks who are willing to try this with you and build your case studies.
A nibble is not a meal: There will be a tendency to try one small social marketing tactics with hopes of hitting a home run right out of the box. You will need to manage expectations like with any other strategy and remind folks that you need to build the entire campaign and execute from start to finish. When was the last time you called only The Today Show or Oprah and they did the segment. You would count on that strategy because you knew it would likely never work. Same here.
Pricing: We think we have come up with a model but will likely have to tweak it along the way. If it is too low then you lose money, if it is too expensive then the client can hire someone internally for less. Depending on the client, a hybrid model also may work. Time is our commodity and social marketing, whether it is in the form of listening and reputation management campaigns, or community aggregation-interaction-and ultimately then driving them to transactions can take a great deal of time. The folks with the money can throw it at this issue like they do with everything else, but the vast majority of clients (especially in this economy) will need to be careful on how much they spend and how they spend it. Which leads me to...
MeasuringROI: It is about playing defense, making sure that you don't get slammed on Twitter and bloggers; or it it about playing offense, by driving people in a newly-formed Facebook group to your website to take you up on your Facebook-only discount offer? Which is worth more in this day and age? Is social marketing even really build to drive traffic? All good questions and what it may really come down to is the million dollar question, who wins? The purists who believe by playing defense you are defending the brand and thereby gaining loyalty or the capitalists who believe that by using this new platform to sell you are driving business. SM expert Jay Baer's take on this is worth reading and a possible glimpse into the future.
I wish I had on the answers, but I don't. I'm being as honest as I can be with anyone who asks me that question including clients. One on one, the best piece of advice Peter Shankman gave me was "please never call yourself a social media expert. Anyone who does that is full of shit. We're all still trying to figure all of this out."
That is a pretty comfortable place for PR folks. We are the people who know what works because it has worked before, but can never "guarantee" future success because we rely on third parties like the media or community leaders to "endorse" our point of view. We also know the factors that can get in the way of that endorsement. That's what makes the third party endorsement so valuable.
So as others are doing and are telling me to do, I am relying on my marketing instincts to do what I think is right. I'm not over promising, but I do see the promise in all of this. And I'm asking my colleagues and clients to take this ride with me. They know me well and for the most part, I don't think I have failed them yet.
A couple of posts ago I made my fearless prediction of 2009, that one major newspaper would go to an online only model and give permission to the industry to follow along.
Interesting idea and one of many being kicked around in publisher's offices across the country. Another is the Sporting News Today model, where a newspaper-looking file is delivered to your email each morning. For those who haven't yet subscribed, you need to. It is very cool looking and is very newspaper-like down to the full page ads.
For PR folks like me this is all very intriguing as we see the model change and contemplate the outlets of the future.
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.