Anyone who makes blogger outreach easier is a friend of mine — and, if they do it smart and have the blogger culture close to their heart and respect the blog and its power and influence, I love.  Here’s an announcement for Inkybee‘s launch tomorrow, February 7th — consider this sort of a scoop (nobody told me to embargo). The folks at Forth Metrics are smart and they do good work and make useful things.

Forth Metrics launches “Inkybee” – a web-based outreach solution for the PR industry

Forth Metrics has launched the full public beta of a new web-based comms tool called Inkybee. Inkybee is a simple tool for public relations, digital marketing, social media and SEO professionals. It is the brain-child of Forth Metrics’ directors David Cumings and Hugh Anderson who spotted an opportunity in web-based PR measurement. The PR industry – and the comms world in general – is being transformed by the shift to web-based digital media. Inkybee aims to help comms professionals with this transition.

Inkybee breaks down the barriers of cost and complexity for small organisations who are undertaking any form of outreach on the web. It finds relevant sites to target on the web, manages the outreach process and measures the end results. Much of its novelty lies in its simplicity, being accessible via a user-friendly web-interface. It is particularly focussed on outreach to blogs which represent a growing opportunity for influencer marketing and are also of increasing importance to search engine optimisation (“SEO”) professionals.

Co-founder, Hugh Anderson, said “It’s a hugely exciting milestone for us. We have been developing Inkybee for over two years and we believe we have created something that can really help the vast majority of PR professionals who are crying out for a simple, affordable solution to manage and measure their web-based outreach.”

The launch is in a free public beta with the objective of quickly moving to a paying model via an affordable, monthly subscription. Several hundred beta testers from all around the world have already been testing it privately and their feedback has helped to shape the product. To learn more about Inkybee, visit www.inkybee.com.

Why we created Inkybee

We created Inkybee to help smaller, independent PR agencies and businesses. We wanted to create a simple, user-friendly, affordable tool that would enable busy comms professionals to do blogger outreach more effectively, saving them time and allowing them to focus on more value-add activities.

We recognised that the PR industry in general finds blogger outreach a painful process and as a result has developed a reputation for doing it poorly. As the power of bloggers and the World Wide Web in general grows, we want to help the industry improve so that everyone benefits from better communication and relationship building. It is a win-win outcome for comms professionals and bloggers.

We started off on a measurement journey to measure the outputs of blogger outreach and online PR effectively. However, we soon realised that the additional pains of finding the right influencers and tracking relationships with them also needed to be tackled. So we built Inkybee to do it all.

We’ve got the first beta version of Inkybee running and it is working well, but there is a lot more to come. Specifically in three key areas:

1. In adding lots more helpful features and functionality – every week you’ll see improvements
2. Adding sophistication to our blog discovery tool – we have the technology to add a lot more firepower to make the results of this much, much better in due course.
3. As our database of blogs grows, we will work with bloggers to help them understand their own niches and the associated network of related, influential bloggers.

Whilst all of this development is going on we will continue to provide lots of helpful educational materials to make sure comms professionals keep learning to do a better job as this exciting area grows and grows.

More answers to frequently asked questions can be found on the Inkybee FAQ page

About Forth Metrics

Forth Metrics is a Scottish-based web technology company. It was formed in 2010 with a vision to create simple web-based measurement products to help smaller businesses that are unable to afford Enterprise solutions. It is one of a number of Scottish Enterprise backed technology companies in Edinburgh that are doing exciting things on the web. Forth Metrics’ expertise spans big data management, complex mathematics, digital, commercial and creative prowess. Forth Metrics is a member of Scotland IS, the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce and AMEC. To contact the company please email info@forthmetrics.com. For more information visit www.forthmetrics.com.

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