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When conversation turns to companies that have embraced social media, Electrolux isn’t one of the names that comes up. However, Richard Gatarski sent me a note about a post he wrote on the launch today of Electrolux’s social media newsroom.

Richard liked the Swedish kitchen appliance company’s newsroom but had a few observations about ways it could be improved. The single comment to the post (as of this writing) comes from Anders Edholm, an Electrolux representative, explaining why some things were done the way they were and acknowledging that some of Gatarski’s recommendations should be implemented.

It’s particularly gratifying to see a company like Electrolux. It’s not a high-tech company. It’s not a massive General Motors-like corporation. And it’s not based in Silicon Valley. Yet the company clearly recognizes the value of expanding the definition of “media” and presenting content in a manner that makes it easy to use online.

The newsroom currently features a tag cloud (tags link to related press releases), video and images (including company videos on YouTube), blog posts about Electrolux products on Engadget and Gizmodo and a series of RSS feeds. The whole site is licensed under a Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial license.

Using the Shift Communications template for a social media newsroom, it’s easy to list elements that could be added down the road to enhance the site. Technorati tags, purpose-built del.icio.us accounts, and an RSS-enabled events calendar leap to mind. It would also be great to see the press releases housed in the newsroom adopt the social media press release format.

But it’s easy to point out what’s missing. Mainly I wanted to add my congratulations to Electrolux for not only launching the newsroom but also for walking the talk by joining the conversation about it that Dr. Gatarski began.

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