Ackura Blog

In discussing PressRoom with PR, Communications Managers and Press Officers what often gets missed is that PressRoom is setup to achieve a different objective to the mainstream online news services, which very effectively puts news and press releases in front of journalists.

What PressRoom is designed to do is optimise the same news and press releases but for distribution to the social web: There’s no reason why you shouldn’t run both services side by side.

In designing PressRoom, we’ve paid particular attention to ensuring that news is optimised for the social web:

• News releases are optimised for Google News & Yahoo News and distributed to a host of blogging and news aggregation services.
• News is distributed through Twitter by automatically generating tweets which include the title of each press release with shortened url to the full article.
• Embedding YouTube videos and Flickr images brings in rich media content.
• Press releases are automatically added to Delicious social media bookmarking account.
• Google Analytics reporting compliments the comprehensive dashboard tracking from Technorati Cosmos, Yahoo Site Explorer & Delicious.

Which is great news for those who are looking to effectively integrate social media marketing into their online press & news service and engage a wider audience.

We’ve added a new feature to the image panel for PressRoom releases. In addition to being able to upload new images for inclusion in a news release, you can now browse your existing photos on Flickr.

You can also search the whole of the Flickr site for Creative Commons Licensed images to use, this gives you access to an enormous amount of imagery, even if you do not have your own Flickr account.

What Is Creative Commons?

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that works to increase the amount of creativity (cultural, educational, and scientific content) in “the commons” — the body of work that is available to the public for free and legal sharing, use, repurposing, and remixing.

Creative Commons licensing means that you can use the imagery with certain restrictions. The licenses that we have included in the search are:

• Attribution License
• Attribution-ShareAlike License
• Attribution-NoDerivs License
• No known copyright restrictions

All of these licenses allow for commercial use of the images, and PressRoom automatically inserts a link back to the original image on Flickr in order to satisfy the attribution requirements of the license.

The browse dialog works in exactly the same way as the recently added YouTube video browser. If you have a Flickr account set-up for use with PressRoom; the default view will be of your own photos. If you do not have a Flickr account registered or if you click on the “Public Photos” tab, you can see the most recent photos added to the site and search by keyword for anything that you might need.

The idea behind the social media news release is too present facts and media in an easy to scan form. The reason for this is that Social Media Creators (the people who are likely to re-publish your news) are avid opinion holders and have a tendancy to take offense at being told that something is “innovative”, “Unparralleled”, “Superb” or any other type of superlative. They want only the facts so that they can make up their own mind as to how innovative, or superb your news might be.

Brian Solis describes Social Media Releases:

Social media releases are designed to get the conversation going, providing readers with the ability to disseminate information and multimedia, bookmark and share the content, and in turn, spark threads. They also serve a purpose of providing new media influencers with the information they need, in one package, in order to write a full story, their way – without having to carve out the BS of a traditional release or pitch.