PR Fail on Company Sites

Monday, February 2nd, 2009 at 9:04 AM | Category: Business, Marketing, Meryl's Notes Blog, Tech No comments

We won’t debate the changing PR landscape and how PR folks need to reach out to journalists. Instead, let’s talk about how companies can better serve journalists.

Jakob Nielsen provides five reasons journalists visit a company’s web site:

  • Locate a PR contact (name and telephone number).
  • Find basic facts about the company (spelling of an executive’s name, his/her age, headquarters location, and so on).
  • Discern the company’s spin on events.
  • Check financial information.
  • Download images to use as illustrations in stories.

As a person who targets journalists and is the subject of PR targetting, this list captures the bulk of the reasons. Yet, many companies fail to provide such simple information.

The following lists the frequent mistakes I see when going to business web sites:

  • Not telling what they do… FAST: Oh, most do talk about what they do, but it takes more than a few minutes to figure it out. Get tips for communicating what a business does.
  • Incomplete About pages: Companies forget to add names, photos, and bios of their management team. Create better About pages.
  • Generic contact information: Companies neglect to provide points of contact beyond the generic info@ or support@. Journalists want a name and real address.
  • Lack images: Companies may think journalists grab the logo on their web site. But usually those logos don’t meet the journalists’ quality needs. Add high quality images of your logo, product, and executives somewhere on the About page or Press page.

I try to walk the talk. I remember working on a redesign of my web site and noticing “meryl’s notes” in the navigation. It dawns on me that even my mother doesn’t know what that means. So “meryl’s notes” turned into “meryl’s notes blog” or “Blog.”

We take our own information for granted because we live and breathe it on a daily basis. If you need help, have friends and family members look at the web site to see if something doesn’t make sense, at least, not as fast as it should. Or you hire a consultant to give you a fresh pair of eyes.

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