David Kluskiewicz

What should the media section of a web site provide? Most are simply a list of press releases. Although every company should have its official releases cataloged for the media and the public, there are many third-party sources that are worth including. Organizations should at least be scanning these sources anyway. Why not organize them and share them with the world?

PR Squared blogger Todd Defren created a solid example of how social media and a few interesting pieces of syndicated information can turn a media page into a rich experience.

With the rise of social media, there are at least a half dozen web sites whose primary purpose is to persistently index pages related to search terms. Want to know what bloggers are saying about your organization or its executives? Set up a search in Technorati. Want to know who’s bookmarking your site’s pages? Set up a del.icio.us search.

There’s also little reason to spend precious time writing executive bios. They probably have a LinkedIn profile, so if they’re current, why not point the media or the public there? It only illustrates more connections.

Defren’s mock up includes all the necessary components to provide information to a site visitor. It won’t work for a lot of companies who want to tightly control their image. But for those whose reputation precedes them (and who aren’t afraid of a little variation in their image) this model press room provides more than enough third party validation and interesting fodder to start a conversation.

Bain fellow Fred Reichheld has a theory on how to measure customer loyalty. By simply asking, “Would you recommend us?” you can, with reasonable accuracy determine whether customers are buying in or shopping around. It’s called Net Promoter Score.
Although this survey method may appear too simple for a lot of organizations, it may make more sense than “boiling the ocean for a cup of tea.” Well developed surveys can produce helpful data, but in the age of consensus, they can take an eternity to approve and execute, rendering them inefficient.

What is especially useful about Reichheld’s method is its repeatability. We can often learn more about something like customer loyalty by examining how it changes over time than we can by trying to analyze every little facet of it at a single point in time. If organizations could get even a few people to answer this question (and the follow on, “Why?” if their answer is 8 or below) regularly, they could discover customer satisfaction problems well in advance.