Planning for News Distribution in Asia-Pacific

Brands spend a lot of time and resources creating news and branded content, surprisingly some of these news-worthy content are just sitting on their websites. Of course not all news are suitable for wider distribution, that is why you have to plan and strategize what goes further than your owned channels, and what doesn’t. That’s a topic for another blog post, but if you do want to distribute your news, what should you be considering?

1. Surfacing content in a sea of information

With a growing number of social media platforms and mobile outlets, press releases still serve as an effective tool to speak to the public in one voice in this fragmented media landscape (Even Beyoncé Uses Press Releases). These official announcements add more credibility to the message, and they help corporations reach and engage with a diversified audience – journalists, investors, influencers and consumers.

In Asia, where digital media consumption is much higher than traditional media, brands have to strategize their external communications and utilize a mix of traditional and online communications channels to tell the brand story. This also means communications and marketing professionals cannot work in soils, and must leverage the different skill sets within the teams to communicate and encourage dialogue with their target audiences.

Ask yourself these questions if you’re eyeing the Asia market:

• How do you surface content in the sea of new media in China? Do you use a mix of news release and social media to tell your story in the world’s 2^nd largest economy?
• How do you build a media database that help you reach thousands of journalists from local, regional and national newspaper, magazine, TV stations and other media outlets?
• How do you increase the visibility of the content you created?
• Do you just post your news on your website and hope your audience will come to you?

For 60 years, we take our clients’ desire to expose their content to heart, and with advanced technology and the rising number of new media channels, we built a network of over 19,000 media outlets within the Asia-Pacific region. Over 8,200 of them are online distribution channels, including syndicated websites, photo and video portals, mobile sites and applications, and social networking sites.

2. Think mobile. Think social.

Asia is home to a growing number of countries where mobile internet usage is significantly higher than the rest of the world. These audiences increasingly consume more content, especially multimedia content on mobile devices. Nearly 2.5 billion of the world’s 4.3 billion mobile phone users in 2013 are in Asia-Pacific, and Hong Kong tops Asia in mobile internet usage with 96% of smartphone users using mobile internet service on a daily basis. So, did you ask yourself these questions:

• Are you pushing your content only to your own mobile app(s) and social channel(s)? How do you increase the visibility of these content?
• How do you deal with the increasing number of mobile and social platforms? Do you wait for the ‘next big thing’ or do you work with a partner who’s investing time and resources to build that network?
• Other than advertising on mobile and social channels, what other strategy do you have to target audiences via these channels?

PR Newswire is committed to bringing its text and multimedia content to the region’s mobile audiences and its influencers, and is investing in partnerships with major mobile players. In 2013, the company secured partnerships with ChatOn (Samsung’s popular instant messaging service with over 100 million users around the globe), and in China: Sohu Mobile News, 163 Reading, Sina Views, Baidu News and Souyue Mobile.

3. Concentrate on what you do best

Many corporate communications professionals and agencies know what they are good at, and that is also why so many of them came to us and leverage PR Newswire’s distribution network to magnify the engagement opportunities. In Asia-Pacific, we have more than 20 media experts who dedicate their time to build, maintain, and refresh our influencer and media network. In 2013 alone, we added over 1,700 traditional and online distribution outlets in the region.

And not all distribution services are created equal – first, not all news distribution service has a local media team; second, our local media experts not only build, maintain and refresh our network regularly, they also review our partnerships with media outlets and work with these media to make sure our clients’ content are optimized and easy to find online.

4. Maintaining and expanding your media database

I put this as the last item not because it’s the least important, but because I am sure you are already doing it and doing it well, with or without an agency. Yet – with increasing media fragmentation as we just discussed, how do you build an army to catch up with all these changes in the media landscape?

You can work with us! PR Newswire amassed a media database of over 73,000 registered journalists from more than 19,000 media outlets in Asia-Pacific, covering 10 different languages in 25 countries/ regions. An additional 5,100 journalists and editors from the region signed up to receive targeted content from us last year, with the largest increase coming from Mainland China.

——

If you plan and strategize in advance with these questions in mind, I’m sure you are ready to distribute your next story.

Sarah Tam is the Regional Marketing Director for PR Newswire. Follow her on Twitter at @sarah_tam.