The newsroom is generally managed by the Dircom. It gives greater visibility to multi-format corporate, financial and industry news content (text, images, documents, video and audio), and facilitates interaction between the brand and its audience in near-real time. This makes it the best source for curating corporate content. Have Dircom turned into heralds of their company's information content?
Today, the daily life of a Dircom is transformed by digital technology. The changes at work are accelerating the speed of transmission, multiplying the number of transmitters and, above all, creating a profusion of information. Faced with infobesity and the porosity of internal and external spaces, the Dircom is the only person who can truly control the coherence of the company's messages.
He begins each day with an act of curation, building his press review with his team. The dircom is aware in real time of the subjects that can engage his audiences, and the material he works on is likely to be shared. What's more, his company's media coverage constitutes an incomparable resource of quality content. A video interview with an executive on a media website is much more credible than one posted on a company intranet. And everyone can find what they're looking for. The company, because it supplies its internal and external audiences with information, and the media themselves, who see an infinite number of company employees accessing and sharing their information online.
Communications teams have the material, the experience of distributing content, and above all, they have the passion. In short, they have the keys to selecting, editing and sharing the most relevant content for their audiences on a daily basis, while staying on track towards the company's desired horizons. In fact, the Dircom is the only member of the Executive Committee to be very active on social networks.
The porosity between internal and external communications, linked to the omnipresence of social networks in employees' daily lives, should encourage communications departments to rethink themselves as newsrooms, offering free access to a reservoir of content for internal and external ambassadors.
Dircom must therefore convince senior management - not always an easy task - that it is imperative to adopt a new, more editorialized, more utility-oriented approach to corporate content, rather than turning to marketing departments. Employee Advocacy programs, with their powerful relay of corporate content on social networks, are incomparably more effective than traditional marketing campaigns, which are often expensive. Not all subjects lend themselves to this, but some, such as CSR, are the pride of employees, who share them openly and without reservation.
To be visible on the web and encourage engagement, companies need to work on their editorial line to offer content that is in tune with current events. Like the media, companies need to offer subjects, angles and multi-format content treatments (video, images, infographics, sound, etc.) across all their channels.
Technology comes into play at this stage. It can accelerate the relevance of this strategy by improving natural referencing. Media relations and communications teams are back in the driver's seat, relying on new content management and SEO systems that enable them to provide access everywhere (web, mobile, push, share) to quality information at a regular frequency, while measuring the performance of their actions.
With controlled content management, and a transformation of their methods and tools, communications teams can finally demonstrate their contribution to the company's success, and become its social herald.