MarCom Professional

Second post of the day and I'm tactfully distancing myself from this morning's innuendos, donning my finest corporate attire, hiding my tattoos and generally looking sharp, to talk about that cornerstone of enterprise continuity - Information Security.

Anyway, sister agency (they're doin' it for themselves) Lighthouse PR have been working hard with client Lumension Security, who today launched a (very nice-looking) eBook on the topic, entitled 7 Things Every CEO Should Know. Okay, maybe you aren't a CEO, but there's some cold, harsh facts about the lengths cyber criminals will go to to get their hands on your servers, that were genuinely uncomfortable reading. More...

Okay, okay, simmer down.

While our delightful, more northern of the two Rainier MDs is off Euro-gallivanting, he has left yours truly in charge of the blog. He’s introduced me below, which is probably sufficient, but do take the next couple of moments considering the implications of a venerable (not venereal, which I almost typed…) PR overlord leaving his established blog in the hands of a 22 year old excitable girl-nerd.

Two words: LOL Cats.

It’s going to take all the self restraint I’ve got not to flood this page with internet memes, but he did say to ‘be myself.’ This means, amongst other things, you may have to deal with thinly-veiled, badly executed and slightly misled Welsh nationalism (expressed like a true ex-pat.. More...

I'm off now to Corfu with my family for a couple of weeks. No email, no mobile and no Internet. But there'll still be plenty of action here as I'm leaving you in the talented and tech savvy hands of Bryony Beynon. She hails from South Wales, via Brighton, and is one of the crew at Rainier PR. When she isn't delivering campaigns for clients, poking fun at popular culture or singing with her band The Sceptres, you'll find her at home at her own blog which goes by the moniker of Sceptered Youth.

That photo will be me around midday next Wednesday. It's bound to end in a thunderous belly flop if that's any conciliation. More...

I’ve walked passed Jessops in New Oxford Street a couple of times this week. It has a window display packed with digital photo frames.

Here’s a product that really should fly off the shelves but just doesn’t seem to work. We’re all creating loads and loads of digital content using cameras, mobile phones and video cameras, yet these devices to display the stuff seem slow to shift.

Our home computer kicks into a Picasa screen saver that rotates through images after five minutes. We sometimes use the TV to display feeds from Flickr and Photobox (a client of our consumer firm Custard PR) and I use my iTouch for carrying personal images around. More...

The keyboard is a really lousy input device for a PC. It is after all based on a 200-year old concept that has changed very little and is a wholly unnatural way of interacting. I feel much the same way about Powerpoint.

PaperShow has had a much better idea. It has taken a technology – the pen and pencil – that we’re all familiar with and use from age 18-months and created an interface that enables you to use a pen and pad of paper as an input device with images and writing on a pad of paper transferred instantly to a PC screen or whiteboard.

That in itself is really neat. But where it becomes really powerful is when you’re presenting or reviewing a document in a meeting. More...

I want to meet Dame Stephanie Shirley. The 75-year old entrepreneur and philanthropist is profiled in the August edition of The Director as part of a series of articles on flexible working. She sounds like a real inspiration.

The IT firm she founded in 1962 built around a model of remote working, with a focus on employee share ownership, social focus and corporate responsibility was acquired by Xansa last year for £470 million.

Here’s her call on how business should view a downturn.

“During the 1970s recession, my husband gave me a second hand fur coat. I wore that coat every day. More...

We have two massive proofing jobs underway at the moment at Rainier PR, in the form of a book and a series of white papers that are working their way through the agency’s editorial team.

Proofing and sub-editing are skills that are disappearing fast in the shift to multi-skilled editorial teams where material is no longer filed for review by a sub-editor, but more often than not published straight to the web. But they are really important, valuable skills and without them our language will be all the poorer.

The rise of SEO-crafted copy is exacerbating this issue, causing real issues for journalists and writers keen to promote their craft ahead of the attention of Google. More...

The ability to stamp user generated content with a location and time in space and then review it in context really fascinates me.

The i-gotU GPS tracker that I bought from Maplin (was £30 in the sale, but now £50) has been used to review train journeys, road trips and afternoon walks on Google Earth. But this weekend it worked just that little bit harder thanks to a neat bit of software.

GPS embedded into cameras is on its way so that photos are automatically geotagged at source with location information. If you’ve already got a camera it’s possible to retrofit geotag data. More...

Why on earth did it take me so long to discover ShoZu? It’s amazingly simple, but incredibly effective. Elegant even. It provides a conduit to simplify communication between mobile devices and web applications.

So when I take a photo on my mobile up pops a dialogue box asking me if I’d like to send the snap off to Flickr. I hit yes, because it’s a cool snap that I want to share with family and friends, and off it goes, almost instantly landing in my Flickr image feed. Now that is neat. Really neat.

You’ve probably stopped reading this post because you knew about it already, right? So why didn’t you tell me about it? Thanks to Andrew Grill and James Whatley for pointing it out to me via Twitter after I’d spent an evening fumbling around with Zonetag. More...