posted by Nicolette Beard @ 2:34 PM
Digital media has turned traditional news sourcing on its head. Journalists now set up news alerts and RSS feeds to track industry news, companies and subject matter experts.
So when a journalist visits your online press room and discovers a plethora of PDF-downloads, what do you think his/her reaction might be?
1) Exit stage left. One extra click is not worth my time.
2) I’ll download the document and may write about you, but I’ll make my displeasure known. (“Hey, I’m only human.”)
3) This is so 90s. Is there a more cutting-edge company worth investigating?
The above imagined scenarios can be measured in higher bounce rates, fewer downloads and infrequent news stories and/or interviews in major news outlets.
When you make your content less accessible, you want to factor in “lost opportunity” costs.
From a technology viewpoint, while it’s true that search engines can now “read” news releases, presenting your news only in PDFs is making a search engine work too hard. If you must post PDFs, be certain you have an HTML version, an RSS feed and submit to newswire services.
If you assume that your audience is accessing your site on a computer or Smartphone equipped with the necessary software to decode the document, you could be right. You also could be wrong.
Key influencers and early adopters are increasingly using mobile applications. You don’t want anything to impede deadline-driven news or to dissuade a potential investor.
If you make your content hard to find, you may find yourself victim of The Law of Unintended Consequences. In other words, you don’t want to overly frustrate your key constituents, whether they are journalists or investors, by making them work, search, click, download and read, over and over again.
Good user experience isn’t a concept limited to ecommerce sites.
Resources: 5 Reasons Why Your Press Page Should Lose the PDFs
