Steve Greenwood pitches PressLeft at January's NY Tech Meetup. (Photo: Vadim Lavrusik)
Steve Greenwood from Drop.io pitched their new product PressLift at the NY Tech Meetup at the beginning of January.
Drop.io, the New York-based file-sharing and collaboration site, is launching the tool during Social Media Week at the beginning of February. The tool allows communications professionals to create multimedia press releases, integrating videos, text, audio and photos — all of which are easily embeddable.
PressLift Creator Steve Greenwood said a lot of the Drop.io users in the communications field were using the product for this exact purpose, taking the links to files and embedding them in text press releases. The idea was to create an application that can do just that, but make it much more usable and effective, Greenwood said.
Along with the multimedia format for a release, PressLift also offers to provide creators with real-time tracking and analytics of their releases and Facebook and Twitter icon links to follow the company, as well as the ability for reader to easily share the release using share buttons. Also, each company account has its own sub-domain (company.presslift.com). This replaces having to e-mail, ftp or send press release content on flash drives.
Here is a video demo of what PressLIft’s purpose:
The real value comes from the simplicity and easy customization that PressLift offers PR professionals who might not consider themselves as tech or Web savvy. This allows them to quickly create a Web page that supplements the standard text press release.
This has the potential to usher a new era of digital press releases that are much more engaging, informative and effective. The ability for users to embed the content makes it easy for time-strapped journalists or bloggers to grab those elements and incorporate them in their reporting.
Below is an example of an embedded image from PressLift’s own press lift for their launch. The press lift gives you an option to download the image as well. Though grabbing the embed code is seamless, having some simple customizable options for those unfamiliar with any HTML might be useful.
The pricing, Greenwood would only say that they “wanted to price aggresively in comparison to alternatives.” He said PressLift will announce the pricing at the official launch at NYC Social Media Week.
Greenwood did say that it would not be a subscription, but a “per presslift” pricing. Users will be able to buy bundles at a discounted price.
“It works because companies can’t always predict the number of press releases they will send in a month,” he said. “Some months will have heavy activity and others without, making a subscription model sub-optimal.”
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