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.

As promised a few days ago, the YouTube integration for PressRoom has now been deployed to the live server. You can see an example of a news release with video included on the Demo PressRoom site.

Another exciting development is the addition of a sandbox mode. This gives complete access to the administration area of our demo PressRoom site. You can try out the majority of the application functionality without the need to request and schedule a demonstration. Just click on the button on the PressRoom login page.

This link will log you in as a demo user

The Demo PressRoom account has some restrictions, we have blocked search engines from indexing the Demo area and have also disabled the RSS syndication and remote publishing to services such as Flickr and Delicious.

Today we pushed our latest update onto the staging server for testing. This latest update adds a simple method for adding YouTube videos to the news releases created with PressRoom.

A new tab has been added to the release editor tabstrip for videos

Clicking on the “Add Video button on the videos page, opens the new YouTube browser/search dialog.

The dialog defaults to listing the current most popular videos on YouTube.

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