Is this the B-School Newsroom of the Future?: Business Access Media Conference Case Study

Samantha Harris from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas, Austin and ExpertFile’s Deanne Taenzer made a joint presentation last week to one of the hottest events on the calendar for MBA public relations directors. Held annually in New York City, Los Angeles or Washington, D.C. the Business Media Access Conference (BAM2015) brings together the top journalists from national and global media outlets covering business issues and writing about the research and graduates of top business schools.

At the conference opening session Samantha Harris outlined how McCombs has been working to showcase its world-class faculty within key areas of the school’s website including a redesign of its featured faculty directory and newsroom. As one of the top five research producing business schools in the world, McCombs wanted a better way to organize and present the content its faculty are producing, while making it easier for the media and other audiences to engage with them on a real-time basis.

Some of the key challenges for McCombs that Samantha described in the presentation:

• Getting Faculty Content Out Faster: Critical information that is always changing can be difficult to update across key areas of the school’s website.
• Supporting for New Content Formats: McCombs needed to easily integrate multimedia, social and mobile media formats into featured faculty profiles. This is becoming more important when pitching experts to the media amidst a growing base of smartphone and tablet users.
• Limited Technical Resources: The McCombs web team was overloaded with other critical projects that limited the marketing team’s options to develop a solution internally.

McCombs has now launched a unique expert content experience utilizing the ExpertFile software platform to integrate comprehensive multimedia faculty profiles. To better serve the needs of journalists for quick access to expert sources, the marketing team at McCombs also uses ExpertFile to publish recommended expert profiles complete with approved quotes to its Newsroom site in response to breaking news stories.

Some of the key benefits of this project as outlined in the McCombs presentation included:

• Better Metrics: The ability to see the growth in faculty profile views, media inquiries and other key trends.
• Faster Publishing: Content can be quickly posted for McCombs faculty in response to breaking news, complete with detailed expert profiles and lift quotes to help reporters discover and evaluate their experts as media sources.
• More Efficient Collaboration: The new expert platform provides a more efficient way for marketing staff to work proactively with faculty and media.

As part of the presentation, Deanne Taenzer of ExperFile also summarized some of the major implications of a changing media landscape and audience behavior.  Some highlights included:

• The Growing Importance of Search: Google is fundamentally changing how audiences discover content and how media find expert sources. Yet many organizations are failing to optimize their content for this new buyer journey.
• The Importance of Visual/Social Formats: Audiences now expect a variety of engaging formats, yet the vast majority of websites do a poor job of integrating video and social content into faculty profiles and newsroom content.
• A Growing Base of Mobile Users: There is a major shift from desktop to smartphones that underscores the critical need to upgrade faculty profiles and newsrooms to be optimized for smaller screens.

What are some of the challenges, activities and successes that your organization has had in developing expert content to driving market visibility and reputation for your organization? Let us know. We also hope to see you at the 2016 Business Access Media Conference in Washington, D.C.