InkHouse Named Small PR Firm of the Year at PR News’ Platinum PR Awards

Breaking news from the Acela traveling back to Boston after just picking up a wonderful and heavy piece of hardware: InkHouse won PR News’ 2012 Platinum PR Award for Small PR Firm of the Year!

This award recognizes InkHouse’s meteoric growth over the last year, propelled by our progressive approach to creating compelling content for our clients and our ability to capitalize on our proximity to the region’s concentration of technology companies.

As InkHouse’s chief content officer, I was thrilled to accept the award on behalf of the entire agency and all of its hard working employees. My colleague Samantha McGarry claims that I dashed, in heels, to the stage to accept the award. Which is probably true. Every day that I come to work, I am delighted by what InkHouse co-founders Beth Monaghan and Meg O’Leary have established—a workplace that is stimulating, fun, collegial and progressive, and a place where clients can trust in what we do every day for them.

Show Don’t Tell: The Writing Edition

Show and tell. That’s the thing you did in second grade when you found a rock, assumed it had fallen from the moon and you wanted to share it with your classmates.

Then there’s show, don’t tell. Not to be confused with Truth or Dare.

Show-don’t-tell is what good journalism schools and what creative writing professors and literary editors preach all day, reminding authors that if you want to grab the reader by the collar, stating the facts isn’t enough. Yes, characters, plot and premise are essential. And yes, your writing needs to be crisp. But then what?

Here are four tips to get you going:

How To Be Opportunistic With A Major News Story

My Facebook feed this week has been buzzing with Chick-fil-A updates. There was the viral letter that Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino wrote to the restaurant chain’s President Dan Cathy saying Chick-fil-A was not welcome to open a store in the city because of its stance against same-sex marriage. And then there were these photos below, posted by different friends; each shows a brand—Sarah Palin and KFC —taking advantage of the media firestorm to get some attention for themselves.

This got me thinking: when is it ok to be opportunistic, piggybacking on an issue in the media? When is it not? And what are the do’s and don’ts?

Do be opportunistic if:

How to Give Good Quotes

Everyone knows that creative ideas never happen at your desk, looking at a blank screen or—even worse—seeing a steady stream of emails pervade the space. Right?

So, I took my salad to the kitchen and ate it at a proper table while reading Time. Leafing through the front of the book, near a photo of a Muslim Brotherhood rally, were some large orange words that read: “It represents the archetypal ‘turd on the plaza.’”

I put down my fork.

Oliver Wainwright, a British architecture critic, was lambasting the new ArcelorMittal Orbit structure that the highly talented Anish Kapoor designed for Olympic Park in London. The picture of the structure was right there, under the quote, but it is so strange looking—a rollercoaster, meets post-modern sculpture, meets something under construction—that my eyes had skipped over that mess and settled on Wainwright’s words, written large.

We’re Growing!

There is a lot that is new—and much to be grateful for—at InkHouse. We have expanded our office space at the Watch Factory in Waltham, growing into another wing of the brick and beam space lined with windows that flood our day with light.

Our growth is due, in part, to something that makes InkHouse special: our Content Bureau, which is always reimagining new ways to tell our clients’ stories.

Of course, visual imagery is a huge part of telling a story. And we are thrilled that artist Don Naylor, who began working with us this spring, has moved his family from New York to join us as Creative Content Manager. Now, we can peek at his graphic designs in progress as we walk by his desk, enjoy his cheerful disposition, be inspired by his thinking and, well, his yellow socks.

5 PR Lessons from Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was a master at PR. That was clear before JFK was elected president and she wrote campaign dispatches that were sent out over the wire.  And it was clear after she became First Lady, when she turned the spotlight on culture and the arts in America.

But Jackie’s public relations genius also extended to six major historic preservation projects – including saving Grand Central Terminal, a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court — in which she was pivotal. Here are five things anyone in PR can learn from Jackie’s masterstrokes:

What a top tech blogger has to say about journalism

I recently had the pleasure of attending a journalism conference in Cambridge organized by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy,  Harvard’s Nieman Fellowship, and the Graduate School of Design.

One of the speakers was Kara Swisher, the founder of AllThingsD.com, an immensely popular tech, media and Internet news site (4 million readers) which she launched 5 years ago after she personally began to think that printed newspapers were becoming irrelevant.

Swisher doesn’t mince words. You would expect nothing less from a hardened journalist – one who turned down a gig covering the White House when she worked at the Washington Post because she was interested in a new phenomenon: the Internet, and AOL.