Amazon.com - The media relation aspect of a tech giant

Amazon newsroom covers all the info about the company’s new policies, announcements, awards, non-profit activities, offering, partnership and achievements, which are quite similar to what can be found on the other online newspaper these days. The top stories about Amazon this month so far has been about what the company did right after its $13.7 billions purchase of Whole Foods and how this aquisingmay affect the company’s revenue in the future.

In class, we heard Ms. Rosensweig discussed about how a press lease shoud be written by the following rules: always help the readers answer these question: who-what-where-when-why wereccthe stories happen, keep it simple and attractive at the same time for readers to follow, only write objective facts without putting any personal opinion or feeling and always write like a news person, not a creative writer. And most importantly, always put the most important information first. These aspects can in fact be easily found in most of Amazon’s press release. For example, the story of “Amazon Expands with New Fulfillment Center in Michigan, Creating1,000 New Full-Time Jobs”. Right at the tittle we can easily determine the how important the content of the article is. The write accessed immediately to why Amazon chose Michigan to be its New Fulfillment Center, who would benefit from this, when and how would this project be executed. At the end of the article, they have a short paragraph about the company itself, which stated Amazon’s four principles, there featured products, how to reach the company’s news and the media hotline.

However, not many of the company’s news reach the online newspaper, Michigan New Fulfillment Center is an example. As a matter of fact, even the company’s official Facebook page does not cover most of the news in the newsroom and vise versa. And even though we can hardly control how the media faciliate the news from the press releases, it is definitely not a good thing to have Business Insider post an article about how bad the Headquarter of Amazon can affect the city it islocated in while other newspaper updating news of States wanting to host the tech giant. At this time, it need more media relation actions from the company’s Communication Team to make an interview with a spoke person or have another press release on how Amazon plan to benefit the community of its located area to calm down the curious society.

How to keep and mantain relation ship with presses has always been one of my biggest concern after 3 years of working in the PR industry, make hundreds of phone calls and experienced both success and fail in managing press conferences. Rodi helped me realize that I have never really put myself in the shoes of the presses when making phone calls, emailing them or writing press releases. I only thought of what I wanted them to know but not what could be useful for them, and even did not pay much attention to follow and be their “friend” on social medias. Her simple but very useful sharings are what I wish I knew when I was still working in the field several years ago.