LEWIS PR launched today a new platform for building and publishing social media news releases and entire newsrooms. The platform, called LEWIS LIVE, is a WordPress-based template for creating SMRs and newsrooms, with built-in SEO tools (titles and descriptions), tagging, multimedia, sharing (on Twitter, with an in-built Twitter pitch, or vial other sharing options to Facebook, Google Buzz and other social media sites), subscriptions and all the features you’d expect from a WordPress blog, including comments fields. Newsrooms also include a feed of current conversations about your company, executive profiles, and feeds from event-sharing sites like Eventful or Upcoming. LEWIS LIVE customers have access to analytics for their newsrooms, that reveal where their visitors are coming from and what content they’re most interested in. Also available analysis of individual SMRs. The newsrooms are completely customizable and branded with customer logo. LEWIS PR can either handle the ongoing management of your newsrooms, or give you full access, as you prefer. All LEWIS LIVE clients receive a free newsdesk – where they can display their past releases, offer subscriptions to future news, provide media contact details and link to their social profiles. All SMRs created and published via LEWIS LIVE are aggregated and can be accessed via the LEWIS LIVE portal. There is no mention whether SMRs published via LEWIS LIVE are indexed by Google News or other similar search engines, and after a basic search we concluded that they are not. At the first review, LEWIS LIVE is not that different from pitchengine, PRX builder, MultiVu (of PRNewswire) or PRWeb. The main advantage I see with LEWIS LIVE is the branded newsdesk (example here), although companies could create their own sub-domains for this purpose, without having to host their news on third party sites. However, if SMRs released with LEWIS LIVE are not indexed at least by Google News, the advantage for the customer is not all that great. We expect more from this platform in the future. As it stands, it looks very promising, but it's just at the beginning of the journey. They still have some work to do to make this a real-value service.
