Ink Dish on Facebook

I’ve gone a little mashup crazy.

Caroline has been playing around with Ink Dish on Facebook and Twitter for a while now, but it was just the other day we figured out how to incorporate it into the site. I was pleasantly surprised at how it easy it was. Facebook has a “badge” you can generate the code for and drop right in. Twitter does the same thing.

Feeling a bit crazy I also created a Flicker account and added a Flicker badge to our site. We are going to use Flicker as a place to upload all of our fan and customer photos, as well as some behind the scenes candids.

Google maps has to be the coolest addition to our site. Google lets us create a map of all of our retailers and easily size it to fit perfectly on our site. We added the map to the “Buy” section of our site to give you an overview of everywhere we sell (with the addition of  Cielo in Portland, Oregon we now have 28 fantastic retailers in 20 cities from Seattle to Boston). You can click on the map to see it full-size and zoom in on your region to figure out the closest shop to you.

When we started this site we knew our blog would be a big part of it. Wordpress was a little bit of a challenge to incorporate into the site, and it still doesn’t fit it seamlessly, but all in all I am very happy with it.

Be sure to check out the map, add Ink Dish as a friend on Facebook and Twitter, and send us a picture of yourself eating of Ink Dish at home and we’lll upload it to our Flicker account.

We’ll keep looking for ways to keep Ink Dish’s site modern enough to match our modern dinnerware.

Twitter Tableware

Neither Caroline or I had any experience with PR when we started Ink Dish. Caroline has done a great job of getting our story out there, and it has really been an interesting learning experience for both of us. Not just about how to promote a product, but it also has given us some insight into the world of newspapers and media.

One thing that surprised me is the number of freelance journalists working for, not just small, but top newspapers. As news organizations get smaller they seem to be working more and more with outside journalists. This can make it a bit more challenging to get in touch with reporters who we believe would be interested in covering Ink Dish, but at the same time when we do find the right people they can pitch our story to multiple media outlets.

Our recent coverage by the Hartford Courant showed me another way newspapers are doing more with less. The article was published in the print edition and website of the Courant on July 26th. That same day it was carried on the websites of the Baltimore Sun and the Chicago Tribune. Over the last couple weeks it has been picked up by the Dallas Morning News, The Modesto Bee, The Standard and numerous other outlets.

The Associated Press has always worked this way, licensing content to other media sources, but until I happily followed this article around the country I was unaware that regional papers also licensed their content.

I don’t know how things used to be, but I assume both of these practices are becoming more and more standard as business models evolve. We are just thrilled to be introduced to so many readers, by so many different papers.