10 steps for building the perfect brand newsroom

Don’t let Felix Baumgartner distract you. Granted that’s not an easy task given Baumgartner’s high-octane, thrill-seeking of choice is to travel to the edge of space in a balloon-powered capsule before jumping out of it.

His 2012 feat was watched by a record eight million people live on YouTube and generated enough hot air on social media channels to power his next adventure.

But despite Baumgartner’s heroics, all in the name of Red Bull, his exercise in content marketing remains an outlier. 

One of the keys to getting the story of your brand right online is to understand your audience and, as a consequence, to understand the myth of virality. Or in the words of Collective Content’s managing director Tony Hallett: “For brands it’s not always about virality. It’s about reaching the right people.”

It is a point echoed by Will Sturgeon, executive director of strategy at Golin Harris. He compares Red Bull with technology maker Cisco which built a news and information channel called The Network. Both are valid examples of brand storytelling with very different audience expectations.

“Fewer people want to read the techie stories than want to see someone jump out of a balloon at the edge of space,” notes Sturgeon. “[But] you really don’t need to reach a mass audience if a few thousand IT decision-makers is your target audience.”

This then is just one of ten steps on the way to building the perfect brand newsroom. Check out the rest below or download the full report...

10 steps for building a newsroom

1. Define your audience

2. Establish an editorial proposition (aka “News you can use”)

3. Don’t fall for the myth of virality

4. Find your tone of voice

5. Build a team

6. Use the diary

7. …but be ready to react to news

8. Define a workable sign-off process

9. Establish no-go areas

10. Remember it’s editorial

You can find more detail on each of these in “The rise of the brand newsroom”, the latest whitepaper from Mynewsdesk. Download it here.