Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Learn how Intel has started their own internal news organization, and how other marketing departments can do it, too....

 

If you’re the CEO or CMO of a company of a certain size (say, a few hundred employees or more), chances are you’ve given some thought to building an in-house news organization. This means going beyond the ordinary meat-and-potatoes content found on most corporate blogs. And why not? Your company is full of interesting people with great stories to tell, so why not generate news on your own rather than waiting for the local newspaper or some industry blog to discover how great you are?

 

You can, of course, also write about interesting people and trends in your industry (not just your own company) and establish your company as a thought leader. It’s all good, as the kids say, and it’s not very expensive. And lately it’s been all the rage among forward-thinking tech companies -- Oracle and Cisco operate fairly large newsrooms, for example.

 

Some companies are even hiring veteran journalists. Qualcomm brought in Michelle Kessler from USA Today to lead its Spark blog, a really professional-level publication that covers a wide range of topics. Steve Hamm, a former technology editor at BusinessWeek, now writes for IBM. Evernote hired Rafe Needleman from CNET. Brian Caulfield, a former colleague of mine at Forbes, now writes for chip designer NVIDIA....