Growing and Blooming: New Clients Fuel InkHouse Growth

It’s been a busy early 2013 at InkHouse. Last week, InkHouse was named a Pacesetter by the Boston Business Journal for the third year in a row, coming in as the 18^th fastest growing private company in Massachusetts. More importantly, we were thrilled to see Boston Police Superintendent Paul Fitzgerald offer the opening remarks, which were concluded by a long and heartfelt standing ovation. We’re also proud that we were among the 500 audience members who helped raise more than $76,000 for One Fund Boston that morning. Thanks to the Boston Business Journal for making it possible!

Our growth continues with a strong roster of new clients that are poised to place big stamps on their industries. We are thrilled to welcome new clients:

Is Blogging Passé?! We Say No Way.

It’s 2013, and you might be thinking about how you are (or should be) using the latest social channels to engage with audiences. I’ve had some clients ask me, “Isn’t blogging over? Shouldn’t we be concentrating on other channels like Google Hangouts, Pinterest, etc., etc., etc.”? Don’t misunderstand me — there are lots of channels worthy of your consideration, but those social networks should be considered spokes to your content hub, which takes its best form as a blog. Quite simply, people like reading blogs—in fact, 46 percent read blogs multiple times per day. And company websites that have blogs get 55 percent more traffic than those that don’t.

Does a Startup Need a PR Firm?

In a random act of Googling last night, I was searching on PR firms and I stumbled on a bunch of Quora and Google+ discussions where entrepreneurs were asking a simple question: how do I choose a PR firm? The answers to these questions were many, all with the same common theme largely from journalists — you can do PR yourself. Forget the agency. Just get to know the press you need and reach out yourself. This argument is not new to me or to the PR community. But we often just sit back and let journalists air their grievances with PR firms — after all, journalists are our clients too. It will come as no surprise that I am on the other side of this argument in most cases (although not always). But for good reasons.

InkHouse Named a Small Agency of the Year by Bulldog Reporter

Bulldog Reporter has announced its 2012 Stars of PR Award winners, and honored InkHouse with a small agency of the year award! We are especially proud of this award because campaigns were judged by a team of working journalists on the basis of the agency’s ability to achieve extraordinary visibility and influence opinion, as well as on industry leadership, creativity, command of media and technology and tenacity.

We’re thrilled with this award and are grateful to our clients—many of whom took a chance on a tiny firm a few years ago—whose unwavering confidence in our team has allowed us to grow and hit this mark. And, as always, we share this award with our talented and hardworking team.

Do You Really Need a Press Release?

Press releases have long been the tool of choice for PR professionals. Up until a few years ago, they were an absolute must. If you were going to “release” news to the press you needed a vehicle for doing it. You’d craft your release, put it on the newswire, and that release would appear in a feed that only members of the press could see.

Of course, that is no longer the case. Anyone interested in a company, product or topic can see a press release through any number of Web sites. And some companies are questioning if there is any value to a press release at all. Sometimes our clients question if it is progressive or “hip” to be doing a press release. They’ll ask, “Shouldn’t we just send an email to a few reporters or bloggers and talk them through our news?” Many reporters would say that approach is just fine. They don’t need the release to write the story.

Do You Need a PR Agency that Does Social Media?

Few communications professionals are really questioning if social media is here to stay. We can all debate how it may evolve, but its existence is no longer a question. Yet many—particularly in the B2B space—are not sure if social media needs to play a role in their PR program. I certainly understand the question. After all, even as someone who runs a PR and social content firm, I can’t justify a huge investment in social content for some clients whose target prospects just plain aren’t using channels like Twitter, Google+, etc. in a significant way. However, regardless of whether you need social media for yourself, your PR firm unequivocally should be using social media to do its job.

Content Curation is NOT Content Creation

Content curation is the term du jour in social media circles these days. While different definitions are bandied about, we define it quite simply here as the monitoring of your Twitter account/ RSS feeds/Delicious bookmarks—or wherever and however you monitor the topics you care about—and then sharing that data through your own social media channels. Done right, content curation can help you serve as a valuable resource to your audiences and even make you look pretty smart on occasion. It also delivers potent SEO juice. But here’s the thing: content curation is NOT content creation. And most importantly, content curation alone is not a winning marketing strategy.