Australian brands ‘failing to engage with journalists and customers through company websites’
Australia’s top 20 brands brands are failing to make the most of newsrooms on their company websites, resulting in missed opportunities to engage with journalists, bloggers and their customers.
The latest findings are from a Burson-Marsteller survey of the top 20 brands in the country as ranked by Interbrand, which include the Commonwealth Bank, NAB, Westpac, Woolworths, Macquarie, ANZ, Harvey Norman, David Jones, Myer and St George.
The survey, carried out at the end of last year, found that the majority of the brands only offer static press releases in their online newsrooms. They are not providing rich media content as a means of enriching company news, while supporting materials such as executive photography, logos and video content are not generally available.
It also found that online newsrooms are not very user friendly, with very few offering search and sharing functions.
Is the survey published anywhere?
why would CBSi have photoshop on their machines – one would assume that they are only responsible for resizing those images. do we need mediawatch to have a look into this?
I could not agree more.
Comnicates’ research confirms exactly this and that is why Comnicate offers Australia’s first software as a service newsroom designed to engage on diffent levels with different audiences and technologies
Just as I suspected…Burson-Marsteller has a crap newsroom. A couple of press releases and a link to a media contact. No video, pictures or even search functionality. It seems a little hypocritical to be criticising companies that have little trouble attracting press coverage when its own newsroom is circa 1997.
http://www.burson-marsteller.c.....fault.aspx
Fair comment, Bob. Our global and local newsrooms don’t do very well against the research criteria.
However, we’re not one of the twenty biggest brands in Australia. We think that big brands could be doing more with their news content and with their newsroom, hence the research.
We’re also not saying that brands are having trouble attracting press coverage but we are saying that we think the quality of media coverage in the future can be improved if rich content (video, audio, imagery) is provided alongside or within news announcements.
The release is available via the Australian site: http://bit.ly/dn0dR8
And the report is available via Slideshare: http://bit.ly/9FJGAj