Well, I haven’t been taking my own advice on this one, so I’m definitely looking in the mirror when I proclaim this Soapbox message. If you’re trying to communicate with an audience, whether you’re selling a product, a service, or just trying to build a network or following, the most important thing to do is Say Something! Now, I’m not saying that you should put mindless dribble on your blog, your Facebook page or your tweets, but your silence will quickly communicate something to your audience: you no longer exist.

I don’t know about you, but if a website isn’t updated since the last time I came, I am not as inclined to stay and look around. If I haven’t received an email from the company whose newsletter I signed up to get, I don’t wonder where they’ve gone… I’ve already forgotten they existed or that we once had a relationship in which they told me what was going on and I clicked on links in their email. Out of sight, out of mind, people.

So, you don’t need to spend hours coming up with the perfect blog post (at least not for every post!), and you don’t need to have the most clever or witty tweet or Facebook status update. But you need to stay connected. Share a revelation you had recently about life, business, the world, etc. Tell people what you’re reading at the moment and how it’s affecting you. Let people know that you’re super busy and probably won’t blog/tweet/whatever as often as you should, but that you’re going to do your best to remain connected. Just be sure that you say something. Something is better than nothing.

So I’m starting a new (soon-to-be-regular) feature on the VOD Comm blog: My Soapbox. It seems that there’s always something that I’m telling my clients they need to be doing on their website, in their business, etc. So I figured, I might as well be telling everybody the things that could help make their site more effective or more SEO-friendly, or what could help their business better connect to or meet the needs of their customers. So whenever you see the soapbox, know that this is something that I’m gently harassing my clients about as well…

This Soapbox is focused on the need for a News Room or Press Room for your website. Whether you have a PR or publicity department generating press releases, you have an outside firm writing and distributing them, or you have one person making up the entirety of your business, it wouldn’t hurt to have a Press Room on your company’s website for two simple (and important) reasons:

1. For journalists or bloggers who want to talk about your company
2. For SEO (or Search Engine Optimization)

Let people talk about you! You can make the life of a journalist easier by giving them the basics to get started on a story about your company or your latest product. In this article by B.L. Ochman (who has an amazing blog on marketing & PR), it’s suggested that in creating your Press Room, you think like a journalist. If someone is interested in writing a story, make sure they have the basics available with no effort on their part. Journalists and bloggers are busy people. So, if you make it easier for them to get to your info, it’s more likely that they’ll pursue a story about your company than they would if they had to pour hours into research about it. On marketing guru Shel Horowitz’s site some of the following are suggested as essential parts of your company’s Press Room:

• Owners and management team bios
• Photos: downloadable, scalable, in 300 dpi (suitable for print publications) and 72 dpi (for online outlets), named/labeled, one for each member of the management team and any products you promote
• Company description and history, including dates, facts and sales figures (or percentage of growth by year)
• A list of products or services and brief descriptions of each one
• Customer demographics
• Audio and video clips with sound bytes about important issues
• Company and product news (with all your releases listed/summarized and linking to the full story)
• In the news (links to actual published articles, opening in new browser windows)
• Contact information for key company players: day, night, cell phone, pager, fax, email (make it easy for the reporter to get in touch with you!)
• Ability to search the site for information, keywords, topics, etc.

Of course, none of that matters if you don’t let people know you have a Press Room! So make sure that it’s obvious to someone on your site, and not tucked away somewhere.

Get more traffic! By having press releases posted to your site (not in pdf form), you create more ways for search engines to find your site. So whether you distribute a press release through the news wires or not, make sure you’re posting those releases to your site in order to give them a longer life (and a broader reach). Even after your release isn’t “current news” anymore, it will live on forever in the world of search engines, which means that whenever anyone is searching on that topic, your site is more likely to pop up in their search. In this article from (my friend!) Sarah Evans, you can get some great tips on how to optimize your press releases for SEO.

So before I step down from My Soapbox, here are a few samples of some sites with great Press Rooms (including a couple non-profits):

• News@Cisco
• Nokia
• American Heart Association
• Heifer International

Now I must get back to work helping some of my clients get their Press Rooms up and running!