A Guest Post By Sally Falkow, President and Co-developer of PRESSfeed.
There’s an old saying – when opportunity knocks don’t stand with your hands in your pockets.
Fling open the door. Grab it with both hands. Or before you know it, someone savvier will have scooped it up and it’ll be gone.
Right now there’s an opportunity that’s not just knocking on the PR door – it’s banging and demanding to be let in. A savvy few have grabbed it. But most PR agencies and in-house teams are standing around with their hands very firmly in their pockets.
What is this opportunity? News video.
Almost every editor of a news website I’ve spoken with in the last six months has told me that a news story with a couple of good, original images, and a video that lets the reader feel like they’re there, is top of their list for news content.
76% of journalists say they use externally produced videos. And they expect to use “much more” in the next year. (Source: 2015 DS Simon Media Influencers Report) Makes sense – the shrinking media newsrooms lack the resources to produce video. Newspapers, magazines and radio stations never had those resources to start with. Now every news website needs video.
The 2015 PRESSfeed Media Trends and Online Newsroom Study shows that only 30% of the Fortune 100, 10% of the Fortune 500 and a scant 5% of the Inc. 500 have a video gallery in their newsroom. 22% of the Fortune 100 companies in the US include video with their news releases. 16% of the Fortune 500 and just 11% of the Inc. 500 offer any multimedia with news releases.
89% of news media ask for embed codes with videos, but corporate America never got that memo apparently. Only a handful of companies in the US offer embed codes with their videos: 9% of the Fortune100, 5% of the Fortune 500 and 3% of the Inc. 500.
There has never been a better time to use our PR skills to get excellent media coverage for our company or our clients. Yes, it takes a little investment in learning how to create great original images and videos that tell more of the story. But it’s not as daunting as it once was.
You can take photos and video on a smart phone or tablet. You can buy a decent camera, a mic and a light for less than $1000. Invest in visual content training for your team.
Fling open that door and grab this PR opportunity. It’s yours for the taking.
To see all 5 Media Trends that are affecting how a brand should be presenting its news content download the full report or watch the video of the webinar with Sally Falkow, Wendy Marx and Rebekah Iliff.
Sally Falkow is the President and co-developer of PRESSfeed, the socially-integrated digital news hub and the author of SMART News: how to create branded content that gets found in search and shared on social media. She was appointed a Senior Fellow for the Society for New Communications Research, a new media think tank based in Palo Alto, in 2006. Her research project on Media Trends and Online Newsrooms is conducted under the auspices of SNCR and has been done annually since 2010.
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