Symantec Newsroom

Public relations as a practice has been fundamentally changed by the Web. News can come from anywhere from any content entity, from high-circulation publishers to individuals. Corporate comms used to be about writing releases, faxing them to reporters, and calling to follow up to help inform a newsworthy or editorial-worthy piece.

Today, news breaks anywhere through a variety of content types: releases, blogs, content marketing efforts, tweets, photos, and videos. PR pros know that helping reporters and bloggers materially construct stories is the best way to help shape them. Edelman Digital was presented with three goals by Symantec: 1) Elevate the company's position as a source of comprehensive security news among IT pros and consumers alike, 2) Make it easier for Symantec break security news quickly with immediate steps toward remediation, 3) Meet the changing needs of the editorial process in light of mobile and the sourcing of news from anywhere.

I partnered with a great team of PR professionals, a great visual designer, and one of my favorite digital agency execs to create a mobile-responsive design that allowed Symantec to present any piece of content as stackable content cards. These cards also provide tapable glyphs to access related video, image, logo, supporting materials, and other clear paths to human sources.

We consolidated our content use cases into four content paths, which gave Symantec a simple filtering tool, expanded content on active security threats, breaches, and viruses. At a glance, a reporter or blogger can scan a headline, a snippet of content, and get an idea of video and image assets that could be used to construct an article or post. The filtering tool also allows for controlled taxonomies to keep pace with the ever-evolving terminology and related search engine queries.

It didn’t hurt that the visual design was amazing, too.