How Toshiba's newsroom is central to driving their global PR strategy

In a recent article in Cross Marketing, Takafumi Arai, the Digital Communications and SMART Community Chief Specialist for Toshiba gave insights into their global PR strategy.

According to Takafumi publishing content online is an essential part of directly engaging with your organisationʼs key influencers. He argues that when organisations repeatedly push out the same message it is likely to be rejected as noise by their target audience, in a similar way to the declining effectiveness of traditional advertising. He believes it is more effective for trusted influencers to spread these messages on your behalf.

Interestingly, he points out that “Strategic PR” has long been a popular buzzword in Japan but it is usually used to refer to a one-off campaign with the aim of creating a buzz on social media or gaining short spikes in media coverage.

However, Toshiba has chosen to focus on a more long term strategic approach in developing a content strategy managed from one global platform. In doing so they can more easily consolidate their messaging and by coupling this with content analysis they can better understand what resonates best with their audience.

What’s more, by creating a hub of content their audience can access Toshiba’s material as and when they want it, pulling their audience towards their website rather than continually spamming them with irrelevant messages.

The online newsroom also supports Takafumi with his traditional PR activities such as reaching out to journalists with press releases and other assets such as video and images, while simultaneously serving the influencers who extend beyond the media, including bloggers, social media users, business partners and prospects.

According to Takafumi these were the top 10 ways Toshiba use Mynewsdesk's newsroom:

1) The press release section provides journalists with information and the assets they need to write about Toshiba.

2) Toshiba use the news section to give the latest information about the business, this is mainly aimed at suppliers and business partners.

3) They use the blog for opinion pieces on a range of topics in a more personal style and tone.

4) The multimedia library displays and stores all of their images and videos. 

5) The social media feeds display content from the different channel Toshiba is active on such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and many more.

6) The documents section allows them to provide more in-depth content pieces and downloads.

7) The events section allows them to keep stakeholders updated with upcoming events.

8) The newsroom can be embedded and displayed on Toshiba's Facebook page to engage with those who follow their brand there. (see above image).

9) The newsroom is search engine optimised helping to boost their site’s ranking and the tagging system allows them to categorise their content for different audiences.

10) The publish tool is easy to use and allows them to distribute their content to all of their social channels like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn at the push of a button.

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