While many companies are delivering a positive online newsroom experience, there are areas for improvement with 35 percent of newsrooms containing information (such as executive bios, annual reports, fact sheets and product listings) that was out of date, according to a new report from Mynewsdesk.

The content being shared by brands showed a clear bias toward traditional media and journalists, with many newsrooms ignoring the needs of broader online influencers such as bloggers. On average, brands posted 11 stories to their newsroom each month but only 21 percent used it to offer added value content such as blogs, related industry news, tips and advice.

The study, What's the Story?, took the top 100 global brands (as identified in Millward Brown's 2012 Brandz Top 100) and benchmarked them against a set of criteria looking across seven categories including content, social media and contact.

Coca-Cola (79 percent) and Siemens (72 percent) topped the ranking, but elsewhere scores were mixed. Despite 98 percent of brands surveyed having a newsroom, the average score was 38 percent suggesting that, while some brands were hitting the mark in some areas, there is still a substantial amount of work needed.

One of the areas where brands fell down was when it came to providing effective contact details for visitors with 26 percent failing to do this and 45 percent leaving out contact details on press releases. The option to sign up for company updates was often lacking, with 70 percent of newsrooms failing to include any sort of email alerts. Locating information was generally difficult too, with 39 percent not including a search function.

Brands also overlooked the importance of multimedia content, with 40 percent failing to provide even the most basic of image libraries and only 51 percent featuring video. Where image libraries did exist, they were often poorly stocked and limited in variety, with images of employees and customers only featuring in 44 percent of them. Nearly half (49 percent) of brands failed to meet the minimum image or video quality level required for publication. Similarly, 71 percent failed to embed multimedia within news stories.