Above the Fold & Socially Acceptable

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Featuring Content: Our Freshest Newsroom Contest Winner

Posted by on Jan 26, 2012 in Articles by Lisa Santora, Best Practices, Content Strategy, Online Publicity, SEO | 0 comments

Congrats P&G! Freshest Newsroom Award Winner!

We’ve been conducting The Freshest Newsroom Contest for a few weeks now, and while there were many fine entries and two top contestants (Best Buy and CDC) we are bestowing the Virtual Blue Ribbon on the P&G Corporate Newsroom.

Dig just below the surface and P&G offers all of the typical news and multimedia archives a journalist would require. It’s this newsroom’s home page and its distinctive Featured Content theme that’s really worth a long look if your company is designing a newsroom.

  •  P&G gives busy users and journalists a quick take with their P&G Featured Views mini-slider. This preview mode provides short news snippets accompanied by meaningful images. Clicking through on any of these news previews shows the user a short news announcement with accompanying PDFs and resources provided as separate downloads. Printing, sharing and emailing icons are in plain view at the top of each article.
  •  On either side of the newsroom home page one finds a clean layout. The left navigation is short and self explanatory, and the right hand side of the page offers an uncluttered column containing a search box, list of media contacts, P&G social media links and the latest P&G tweets.
  • Beneath the Featured Views section are the P&G Featured News Releases; presented in a similar format to Featured Views. This is a very user-friendly presentation that allows the user to see a variety of news pieces without scrolling. It’s not necessary to click through on most of the releases as they are succinctly summarized in the Featured summary.
  •  Completing the newsroom page layout is the P&G Featured Video. It is only 1:12 minutes long which is a perfect length to tell a story without losing the audience’s attention.
P&G’s design exemplifies all of the best practices in usability and search engine friendliness that make a terrific newsroom. The word ‘Featured’ indicates to the user that this page is frequently refreshed with new content. Users will check back more often when they know that content is updated regularly. Search engines, especially Google, evaluate a site in part, by its relevant, fresh and authoritative content.

Congratulations P&G, our first annual Freshest Newsroom Award Winner!

Lisa Santora is the freshest copywriter this side of the Mississippi (and quite possibly on the other side too). We count ourselves among the fortunate ones just to know her. Lisa heads up our Content Optimization teams and is also among the most brilliant in the industry when it comes to Online Press Optimization and Content Marketing. Lisa has a knack for everything “fresh” (her favorite word) and also making our clients smile on a regular basis. Lisa not only knows the best uses of commas and apostrophes but she’s also an expert on sports (football specifically). We have no doubt that we lucked out in nabbing Lisa for our team before someone hired her as the General Manager of an NFL team. When Lisa is not the featured caller on football talk radio, she blogs about content marketing strategies, online press trends and other Google news on Above the Fold & Socially Acceptable.

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