Social Newsroom Launched!

Today we launced a new social newsroom on horngroup.com.  It aggregates content, news and industry insights from Horn Group and our clients in a gallery format.  We included social commenting functionality on every page to encourage community response and discussion. 

We're certainly not the first to build a social newsroom -- you know the cobbler's children have no shoes.  But we expect this kind of newsroom to quickly become a replacement for the static press rooms of most vendor sites and ultimately the entire website.  Companies are starting to figure out that they have to publish and aggregate original content, and a newsroom like this is a safe way to embark on a more social form of communications and interaction with their audience.  Agencies like ours have an opportunity to be the source for that content and it's design/distribution.

The newsroom was created by our interactive design team.  Here are some details about the navigation and content:

• the main landing page combines featured content, client and agency headlines, and direct access to our team
• the Content Gallery combines video, photos and presentations that share many of our best practices with the community
• social commenting on every piece of content
• an aggregation of feeds from all Horn Group employees on Twitter -- found on the left hand vertical column -- for a quick snapshot of what's on our minds
• search by category, tags and key words
• built on a robust, open-source content management system integrated into the rest of our website that pulls content from both outside and inside the site 

This is the start of several new directions we're taking with our website in the months ahead and we're eager for feedback.  There are bound to be some bugs and glitches along the way -- drop me a note at shannon.latta @ horngroup.com if you catch anything.  We're excited about having a more social website and the potential for doing this kind of work for other companies.