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Mac vs. PC: What does your computer say about you?

If this infographic is anything to go by, you’re likely to be better educated, more popular and younger if you favour Macs over PCs. 

Inflammatory?  Definitely.  Accurate?  Who cares, it’s all about incensing debate.  Pointless?  Most definitely not.  While the content may be tongue-in-cheek and not especially useful to anyone, this little stunt is sure to generate plenty of publicity for its creator – crowd-sourcing website Hunch.

 

Stressed PR officers

by Mike King

US based HR firm CareerCast has just released the findings of its annual survey into the most stressful jobs in America.  Although the findings are vaguely interesting, with PR officer listed as the second most stressful job behind airline pilot, what interests me more is the level of critical feedback the story has received from PR professionals.

As part of the survey, average salary information is listed.  If reader responses at Ragan’s PR Daily are anything to go by, the average salary quoted by CareerCast for PR Officers is way off the mark. 

According to the survey, PR is getting more stressful, with last year’s results showing PR Officer as the eighth most stressful job .  Then again, you have to question the validity of a survey that shows fire fighter going from the most stressful job in 2010 to not making the top 10 at all in 2011.  

Social networks and French ID cards – odd combination?

By Fatima Meddad

With 2009 seeing an alarming level of ID fraud in France, the French Senate passed a reform bill to introduce ID cards.  This bill will be discussed by the Assembly in the coming months and, if enforced, will see electronic forms of identity stored on two separate chips contained on French ID cards.  Needless to say this issue has caused a great deal of controversy.

The first of the two proposed chips will use standard biometrics – fingerprints, retina scans, etc. – to identify individuals, while the second, less conventional, chip, is designed to collect a person’s activity on social networks.  I’m pretty sure that many of my Facebook status updates would be of little interest to officials, but I suppose this reflects just how important social networks have become to society.

Of course, this raises serious questions about privacy.  Personally I think such measures dehumanise individuals – the proposed scheme reminds me of Blade Runner or A.I.!

How real is your girlfriend?

It seems that today, keeping up appearances doesn’t require finding some pleasant and attractive company for the evening.  Indeed, with the growing influence of social networks on our everyday life, our relationships in those networks have become seen as sometimes more important than real life.

So for those who want to pretend to be spoken for, it’s much easier today than it was in the movies. You don’t have to convince someone to come to your school reunion or family celebration, you only need someone to play the role on Facebook.  Cloud Girlfriend does just this, allowing users to rent a girlfriend via the website, and also to define how she is meant to be.  This all seems a bit much to us (and a little creepy!), but it clearly works for some.

How far would you go for your Facebook status?

 

Word master or word slave – how dynamic is your PR speak?

By Bex Surtees

We all have go-to words in times of creative need.  I’ve been known to rely on ‘innovate’ far too much when writing various PR materials, not to mention ‘leverage’ and ‘disconnect’ (yes, I hang my head in shame).  And while we’re on it, let’s face it, there really are only so many times you can use the term ‘solution’ in tech PR right?  Wrong.

Following the list of PR words he compiled in June last year, PR strategist Adam Sherk took the top 25* most overused buzzwords in PR and marketing and ran them through PR Filter (a website from RealWire that aggregates press releases). 

The results revealed that ‘leading’ was the PR world’s word du jour with a whopping 776 occurrences – in a 24 hour period no less.  Not to be outdone, ‘solution’ was hot on its heels with 622 mentions, with ‘innovate’, ‘unique’ and – that old chestnut – ‘leading provider’, all featuring in the top ten.  Are you wincing yet?

I think it’s time to dig out the thesaurus. 

*  To clarify, there are actually 23 (instead of 25) buzzwords as PR Filter treats some words – like ‘innovate’, ‘innovator’ and ‘innovative’ – as single words. 

Follow Bex @BexySurtees if you fancy a word-off!

The need for speed

We all know that slow websites can be a bit of a bore.  Gone are the days of dial-up when we were prepared to sit for what felt like an eternity, waiting for pages to load.  Now, if sites don’t appear almost instantaneously, browsers tend to get disgruntled and many will give up and click on to an alternative site.

But what does this mean for the site providers?  Here’s a great illustration by Strangeloop, courtesy of Mashable, showing how time really means money online.

A look at some of tech’s best April Fools

By Fiona Halkerston

Aaaahhh, April Fools’ Day.  The day when no one trusts national headlines and companies put a hold on distributing “on-message” press releases in favour of some light hearted fun.

One of my personal favourites that I’ve seen so far was that Google announced Google Motion – a way of controlling Gmail with a ridiculous range of movements including miming licking a stamp to send an email.

I also particularly like the Playmobil Apple Store play set, although I know some people that probably wish this product wasn’t a joke!

YouTube also got in on the action with a blog post celebrating a century of streaming videos.  So what have your favourites been so far?  Please get in touch with some other April Fools gems!

Follow Fi on Twitter and see if you can fool her at: @Fihalkerston

Are you an influential tweep?

By Dana Hashem

The clever bods at Twitalyzer have whipped up a list of the top ten most influential tweeters, and it got me thinking about just what, exactly, a tweep has to do to gain some kudos in the twittersphere these days.

Sorry, but you can’t get away with just clocking up lots of followers anymore.  That’s right, you know who you are – and we can see right through you (*cough @LadyGaga splutter*).  If you want to up your game and make a valuable contribution to the online community, take your lead from the likes of @rafinhabastos, @stephenfry and @KimKardashian and ask yourself:

• Do I tweet regularly?
• Do I often respond to tweets from followers with personal messages?
• Does my Twitter name get mentioned a lot by other users (including RTs and HTs)?
• Do I share interesting information and links before anyone else does?

If the answer to most of these is ‘no’, then you’d better head back to the drawing board.  This, of course, goes for corporate accounts as well.  Nobody wants to have news blasted at them – there’s more to be gained from actually interacting with your customers online. 

Don’t believe me?  Take a look for yourselves: @Starbucks = tweeting #WIN, @CostaCoffee = tweeting #FAIL.

Beware of the bacn monster

Spam is an all too familiar nemesis of any respectable inbox.  But beware, there is a legitimate challenger to spam for eating up your inbox: bacon (or “bacn”).  Bacn is essentially email that you sign up for, so newsletters, Facebook notifications and shopping alerts – us PRs probably get more of these than most! 

The lovely infographic on the left, starring the bacn monster and put together by Unsubscribe.com (whose mission is “to stop unwanted email at the source!”), shows just how big a problem this is becoming and just how lucrative it can be for the businesses distributing the messages. 

The problem for us is that we simply can’t afford to unsubscribe and give up bacon.  We need the newsletters and Google News alerts and we want the Facebook updates.  So, if anyone has any tips on how to cut the fat and get to the good stuff quickly – let me know!

Online over-sharing

by Nicole Melzer

A few days ago, when shopping for a new mobile phone, a shop assistant presented me with one of those so-called smartphones.  Music downloads, mobile shopping, mobile banking – what a great new world of possibilities and information. 

Now I wouldn’t consider myself to be old-fashioned and I’m fairly open-minded to new technology, but this got me thinking. 

“Connecting people!” is the very well-known slogan from Nokia.  Being connected to your friends and followers at any place or time is what is distinctive of our time.  This has been truly defined by the popularity of social networking sites, allowing you to share your thoughts, locations, links and so on with your friends wherever they are 24/7.

But what do you like to share with others? One simple question: would you like to share an interesting shopping website or funny video with your friends?  Most of us probably would.  But what about your online banking site?  Or how about letting others discover that you’ve been browsing some, erm, sites of a more adult nature?  It’s likely that this would make some of us feel a little more uncomfortable – however this type of online over-sharing is now a reality.  

The new US social discovery portal Dscover.me enables you to share your browsing habits with your friends, and follow other users in real-time.  All you need to start your webtours is Google Chrome or the special browser Rockmelt.

The idea behind social discovery tours looks simple: watch each other navigating the web and chat.  Essentially you will share whatever you are browsing, although users do have some say in this.  While it may not seem like you are giving away very much information, Internet services like Dscover.me or Sitesimon really blur the lines of what is public and private information and for me, the negatives of this really do outweigh the positives.