What’s the story….with our newsroom benchmark?

By now you should have all seen our comprehensive benchmark report of the newsrooms of the top 100 brands in the world. If not, you’ll find a link to download your own copy and a selection of findings in our previous blog post on the topic. This time around, we wanted to give a bit more background as to how and why we conducted this study.

The why

Where before the newsroom was just a place to put press releases and a few pictures of products for journalists, now it is somewhere that stakeholders of all types – bloggers, investors, customers –go to find out more about your company.

An even greater change is also occurring in terms of the type of content brands put on newsrooms. The modern method of choice for brands to tell their story is through value added content, designed to engage visitors – in essence, becoming publishers in their own right.

We therefore wanted to see exactly how businesses are making use of their online newsrooms in 2013. Are they all becoming publishers? Have they adapted to the visual web? Do they still cover the basic functionality of a newsroom at the same time?

The how

To find out, we created a set of best practice criteria against which we could score and benchmark the newsrooms. We emphasised from the start the need for these to be quantitive rather than qualitative, so that our findings were based on concrete evidence. However, we also saw a need to go beyond simply carrying out a namecheck of features.

Rather than simply saying ‘Newsroom X has this’ we wanted to also capture how well these features met the needs of visitors, ie: ‘Newsroom X has this and does it in a very useful way’.

This gave us a scoring system with a total of 58 marks, across more than 60 different criteria.  These looked at every aspect of a newsroom; from how easy it was to find in the first place, right down to whether images were the right resolution for media use.

The who

Finally, we then decided which brands we would be assessing. As we were striving for this to be as fair a test as possible, we needed to take in to account the fact that not every business’s newsroom offering will be, or indeed needs to be, alike.

Many factors will affect just what they need to offer, who will be interested, what they will be looking for and even how much resource a business can put behind a newsroom – should we expect an SME to spend the time amassing all the materials that Cisco provides?

We therefore decided to concentrate on the brands listed in the Millward Brown 2012 ‘Brandz Top 100’. The thought process behind this choice was that these were all brands of similar levels of public interest, they are (for the most part) all financially sound enough to supply the materials demanded by visitors and – most importantly – they are the organisations that should be leading the way in cutting edge techniques of communicating their stories.

And the result of this research? If you haven’t yet seen for yourself, download the final report ‘What’s the story?’ today.  We’ll delve further in to the benchmark’s findings and information we learnt in upcoming blog posts.