Ngage Public Relations director Russell Tandy |
Ngage has developed two systems to communicate with journalists and - most importantly - assist in making their lives easier.
The first is the Ngage RSS Media Feed, which allows journalists to subscribe to any new updates from Ngage clients. RSS - or Really Simple Syndication - is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works, such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video, in a standardised format.
An RSS document - named a ‘feed' or ‘channel' - includes full or summarised text, along with publishing date and author. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically.
RSS feeds benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place," says Ngage Public Relations director
Russell Tandy.
The second tool is the Ngage Media Zone, which is an extranet providing individual client pages with background information, media releases, audio clippings, photographs and technical documents for journalists to browse at their leisure.
"This means that we no longer have to send journalists photographs and large documents that clog up their email when we send a media release. If using the release, journalists can browse the Media Zone and download relevant documents and photographs," Tandy explains.
The layout of the Media Zone is straightforward and easy-to-use, allowing journalists to browse through information concerning each of Ngage's clients at their leisure. All information that is uploaded to the Media Zone is dated - to the precise time - and the person responsible displayed so that journalists know exactly when the information was made available and who is responsible, in case they require any further assistance.
Ngage's Media Zone continues to grow daily and strives to be a resourceful tool in a journalists search for important information.
While still strong in traditional methods, Ngage is using new technology to partner with journalists and help them create the best possible article.
Journalists get enough spam mail on a daily basis, and sifting through documents is extremely time-consuming. We aim to enable writers to source what they need, when they need it.
According to Deputy Editor of Features and Multimedia at Creamer Media - publishers of Engineering News and Mining Weekly -
Shannon de Ryhove, the RSS feed is easy to access and, as the title suggests, provides really simple article headlines. “Each time I open Google, I can quickly scan the list of press releases and open the relevant ones I need. The picture downloads are also super-handy, and save a lot time when journalists are on deadlines and don't have the time to call around looking for visuals to make published articles look great.”
Response from journalists to both systems has been fantastic: “Journalists that we deal with on a daily basis have thanked us for making their lives easier by providing the information that they need on one platform that is easy to navigate,” says Tandy.
What's more, Ngage prides itself on its writing skills. “Only journalists write our media releases, which helps in getting our clients maximum coverage, but we also ensure that our technology evolves and changes with the times. Gone are the days when media releases were sent via post for journalists to re-type and scan in photographs: It's our job to find out what journalists need, and provide that information in the easiest way possible,” concludes Tandy.
Visit Ngage's Media Zone at
www.ngage.co.za.
