The Company’s newsroom offers easy access to news releases, press contacts, videos, media kits, executive bios, photos, and everything else a journalist or investor may be looking for. Sun also has a huge development team and savvy PR people.

The good news is that it won’t cost you tens of thousands of dollars, or too much time to build your own online newsroom. Content menagement systems like Wordpress have made it easy for even novice PR pros to build, monitor, and update an online newsrooom. The American Red Cross is a great example of a company that used Wordpress for their online newsroom for Hurricane Gustav and Ike. Although there are a few things we would’ve done differently to make the page more user-friendly, and optimized for search, they did a good enough job using Wordpress for their newsroom.

Here are a few ingredients that every online newsroom needs:

PR Contacts- Easy to find contact information for your company’s PR or editorial contact

Well-organized archive of news- Make it easy for visitors to your online newsroom to find what they’re looking for. If a journalist is looking for a news release your company issued three years ago about revenues, they should be able to get to it in no more than 3-4 clicks.

Basic facts about your company- A short html and PDF fact sheet about your company

Your spin- Industry presentations, speeches, video interviews with your execs, past publicity

Access to financial info- SEC filings, links to analyst reports; you can include this in your fact sheet if you don’t have enough materials for a separate section of your newsroom

Easy-to-download images- Low and high resolution images of your executive team, logos, and whatever else you may have on file that could help strengthen a story

Journalists and investors don’t want to search for what they’re looking for. They want to know that they can come to your Web site and get it all in one place. A well developed online newsroom will help journalists’ productivity, and shareholders’ level of engagement.

Most were there to pitch their company to investors and whenever the topic of enhancing communication came up, they quickly changed the subject to liquidity in their stock.

Quick fixes usually fall apart at the seams before too long. There are so many instances of small public companies that are seeking a quick boost in their share price without any lasting effect. Actually, what ends up happening is a lot like what happens when you end a crash diet. You end up back where you started or worse off.

Many of these small public companies don’t realize the value of a bottom-up approach, where seeds are planted and tools are developed to encourage collaboration, chatter, and an open dialogue.

Our approach has always been to empower our clients–give them the applications and solutions they need to more effectively communicate with their shareholders. Whether it’s an interactive corporate newsroom, a company message board, or a blog, our clients know that intellibridgeIR puts the power back in their hands.

The rules of IR and PR have changed. The goals haven’t. Companies today need to realize that they are no longer in power–their investors are scouring message boards, blogs and investor communities for the latest dirt on public companies.

So what can management do in a market where trust is as scarce as cash? Regain their investors’ trust by engaging them in conversation. Answer the tough questions, and do it in a public forum.

Coming up with a snazzy promotional site, and e-mail blasting it to “millions of investors” may boost your share price for a few days. But what happens when the promotion loses its luster and investors realize that your company is relying on smoke and mirrors rather than trust and open communication to build shareholder value?