I am delighted that today we are announcing the completion of our latest investment round of €1.25million. We are thrilled that The North West Fund from the UK has joined forces with our existing investor Veraventure together with further support from Tekes NIY to back our business plan. We have secured the growth capital we need to push forward with our repeatable solutions offering by strengthening our team, expanding our operations and developing our core platform.

We start by creating a new sales and production centre in Liverpool in the UK. From there we will run our CloudStore operation and help our global PR clients deliver digital services more efficiently and effectively than ever before. Indeed, our ambition is to help define the industry of repeatable digital solutions and now we have the gas in the tank to allow us to do it.

Our Board has been strengthened with the arrival of Brenden Holt as incoming Chairman. Brenden brings with him a wealth of knowledge around building successful technology-based companies and he and the Board will play a vital part in ensuring our success.

I look forward to working in partnership with our clients and all of the PR community to drive forward lean digital production. The PR industry has a fabulous opportunity to grab the high ground in the battle to deliver high quality digital services. We want to help the industry implement production processes that drive down costs, drive up quality and ensure that more time is spent on the developing the clients message to the market. We believe that repeatability is the key to this, and I hope to be able to share that vision and our solutions with you in person over the coming weeks and months.

I want to thank our clients; in particular Hill+Knowlton and Edelman for their support in helping our business concept go from idea to reality. I also want to thank my team who, to a person, has worked their socks off to make Hammerkit a success. I think they deserve a heap of recognition for that. So thank you all!

Now it’s Hammertime!

Download the English version of the press release here
Download the Finnish version of the press release here

As part of our growth plan we are looking to recruit talented, committed team players to help us deliver repeatable solutions to the PR industry globally. We have a number of positions open right now in our account management; production and development teams and you can review them here.

In a nutshell, our account management team will be helping clients to get their CloudStore up and running and will have a unique position in the industry of being acting as format producers, working with clients to help them discover the web services that could be repeatable and making sure they are created and placed in the CloudStore.

Our production teams will be working on original web formats as well as managing the fulfillment of format repeats. This requires talented web designers, developers and UX gurus with amazing organizational skills.

In our development team we build and maintain the Hammerkit Cloud Platform. Joining this team will give developers and DevOps people the challenge of creating a world-class software development platform and cloud infrastructure that has to perform 24/7 for a global user base.

If you feel you have the talent, the track record and the tenacity to help drive our business forward then apply. We’re waiting to hear from you.

In the meantime, why not have a look at the roles currently available in our careers section

There seems to be precious little positive news about how technology is or will impact PR in the coming year. Short of discussions around the use of the social networks, I do not get a sense that PR is really looking at how digital services can boost their clients business success and I am wondering why.

Clearly, we are in the age of social video, so I would have thought it would make sense for businesses to be looking at how to use video to boost understanding of its products and their benefits. There are also wider opportunities to educate, inform and influence demand that help to shape a whole product approach to marketing beyond PR. A recent study by the Content Marketing Institute found that only half of businesses considered this to be a viable content marketing approach in 2011, but that more than 60% of the companies that used it thought it worked. Many still prefer articles, social media and blogs, but conversely are less sure they work as well as video (50%/50% and 58% respectively). (Members only report:  B2B Content Marketing: 2012 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends). However, the trend toward video is dramatically positive with 27% year on year growth. Expect this to increase further in 2012.

Moving forward, however, the biggest growth area is going to be in mobile. I believe that 2012 will see a rise of the mobile content delivery that may even eclipse traditional web channels. For PRs advising clients, you should think about mobile sites, mobile applications and mobile magazines as power tools to get their message across. At present, mobile content only makes up about 15% of the content marketing mix, so look out for this growing fast to reach similar levels to social networks and blogs.

I would be really interested to learn a little about the trends you see as a PR professional, so lets discuss it. 

I read with interest an article in ReadWriteWeb about the launch of a new cookie cutter design for mobile web services. The thing that was interesting was the how the author, Dan Rowinski, positioned the idea that it might be a negative thing for services that make it easy to create sites and apps. His question to mobile web developers was "Are we going back to a mass of websites that all look the same, back to the era of Netscape and boring design? Or are services like FiddleFly a good thing for the development community?" The readers comments that came back were predictable: 

• - if you make it easy you cannot produce sophisticated services
• - you can only do simple stuff with WYSIWYG
• - to really create an engaging presence you need to create a unique service

The presumption that efficiently produced products and services should be any less engaging, powerful or sophisticated is an interesting position for the industry to adopt. Clearly, almost every other major industry in the world has worked out how you can combine "cookie cutter" production with customer delight. To move forward, the digital industry has to break this mentality of hand-crafted is the only way to produce great services.

Our challenge for 2012 is to help the PR industry undertake digital intelligently. By repeating the basic functionality and avoiding reinventing the wheel every time, PRs are going to focus more energy on the parts that matter to a client - their message and whether their call to action is converting to sales.

I would be interested to hear your thoughts on whether "cutting the dough" is the same as selling a delicious cookie?

We had a great discussion at our Repeat This! webinar yesterday, with industry practitioners posting some great questions for Ulla Jones (@UllaJones) from Hill+Knowlton and myself to mull over. This webinar is the first in a series where we will look at how repeatable solutions can boost the revenues, margins, quality levels and collaboration within PR agencies and over the coming weeks we will be taking the show to meet some amazing people in the world of PR.

The big themes that came through were certainly around the fact that the PR industry can really surprise the established "digital agencies" by creating digital services efficiently and being the champions of the digital conversation on behalf of their clients.

We spent time discussing how repeatable solutions are already helping Hill+Knowlton in Helsinki to produce high quality digital projects at light speed, and Ulla was really pushing the point that clients need help to define what they need when it comes to web solutions.

Ulla's prediction for 2012 was centred on social media moving even faster, but with PR agencies helping clients to learn to "swim for themselves", and the rise of the mobile site as the key deliverable for many PR related activities. If Ulla's predictions are true, we will be producing a lot of repeatable solutions for mobile and I have sneeking suspicision it will be.

Big news! I repeat, big news! Not only will I be hosting a webinar with Hill+Knowlton tomorrow at 4PM CET, we are planning to follow the webinar with a whole series of webinars and clinics that are designed to educate the PR industry about repeatable solutions and the benefits they bring. The schedule for the rest of the Repeat This! series will be solidified in January, so stay tuned for updates. 

We hope you join us tomorrow when we kick the series off, but if you can't make it, fear not! True to fashion, we will repeat the webinar again in January.

Register here

With the growing shift of client marcomms spending from traditional to digital channels, what does it mean for PR? I think it means that unless your agency starts to gain the capability to produce digital well - not just post and manage social media conversations, but actually move into the world of helping move internal and external comms on to the web.

For example, more and more businesses are creating digital annual reports for shareholders, or producing digital newsletters for clients and staff. They are creating Facebook landing pages that capture "Likes" and engagement and microsites to drive SEO rankings. These used to be complex productions, but today there are many ways to produce them effectively.

We talked to a number of clients and many of them have set the goal of 100% of the marcomms being spent on digital productions. This literally means no more print publishing of any type. What does this mean for PR agencies and what opportunity does it create?

Personally, I believe that content has always been king, so if PR agencies can do digital intelligently, then coupling this with the ability to write well and the trust of the client to put their message out, I think PR has a great future. What do you think?