How Are You Being Heard?

At a time in America’s history when the threat of war was pervasive and the future unclear, President John F. Kennedy stood in front of the nation and delivered his now infamous inaugural speech where he requested of citizens: “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” That request came after the newly elected president painted a picture of the grave situation facing the country, and the need to band together with allies, and against enemies.

Fast forward 52 years to a more recent example of a request to band together – albeit not nearly as grave, but a request nonetheless. Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo! has recently asked that all “Yahoos” return to the office, banning the flexible work-from-home environment in place at the company today. The request came in a 246-word memo emailed to employees from the HR department.

John McElhenny: InkHouse’s Newest Vice President

Today, InkHouse is thrilled to welcome John McElhenny as a vice president. I came to know and respect John many years ago when we covered politics together. He was at the Associated Press at the time. Not only did he always ask sharp questions but he always made his fellow reporters – and sometimes elected officials — crack up from the dry application of his wit.

While InkHouse does not have a “sense of humor test” akin to Google’s famous hiring process, we do screen for likability, brains, innate curiosity and the ability to write well while applying AP style. (A recent piece that he ghost-wrote for a client in a major outlet included references to Magnum, P.I.; Ron Burgundy and Smokey & The Bandit in the same breath.)

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.

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.

InkHouse Receives Four Bell Ringer Awards

A few proud InkHousers

The Publicity Club of New England handed out its 2012 Bell Ringer Awards last night, and honored InkHouse with four of them! Since 1969, the Bell Ringer Awards have recognized excellence in communications and public relations work in every field and across all traditional and social media channels.

We received awards for the following client campaigns:

• Gold Bell for Raytheon IDS: Space Debris Byline in the Bylined Article category
• Silver Bell for Raytheon MathMovesU: Pi Day Celebration in the Community/Consumer Affairs Campaigns category
• Silver Bell for Zmags: Connected Consumer Campaign in the Marketing Communications category (check out their post on the award)
• Merit Award for Fiksu: Indexes in the Product/Service Publicity in the High-tech Campaign category

We’re hiring. Purple squirrels please apply.

We’re hiring. This may not be news at InkHouse, where our continuous growth requires us to find smart, curious people who are creative and passionate and want to participate in a rapidly evolving industry. But it is news at a time when the national unemployment rate remains at 8.5 percent.

You’d think it would be easy to find qualified candidates in this economy. Yet what we do, and how we do it, requires a special kind of person. You might say we are looking for purple squirrels, a term used by employment recruiters to describe an unlikely job candidate with precisely the right education, experience, and qualifications that perfectly fit a job’s multifaceted requirements, perhaps even allowing a business to function with fewer workers.

Content Marketing: What Music Can Say About a Company

Educate or entertain. These are the two most basic rules for content marketing: how to get people to pay attention to you, to listen, to learn, to reply, to like you or whatever it is you’re selling – whether it’s an idea, a service or a widget.

Most often, we think of words as the medium. Increasingly, we use video. Pictures also have taken on new significance through tagging on Facebook (which helps optimize your news feed and put the content in front of more friends).

But thanks to new streaming and sharing platforms such as Spotify – music is another opportunity to educate and entertain. For example, I love what @Time magazine did earlier this month as part of its Person of the Year issue, offering a playlist on protest songs as part of its coverage, giving another dimension to a story in the same way an infographic might.