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I really never thought I’d say this after only three years in PR but, come January, I’m going to be a published author. And I think that’s both quite humbling and seriously cool.

A little while ago, I was kindly invited by Christer Holloman to contribute a chapter to what became The Social Media MBA – a guide for marketers of all levels to emerging trends, supported by tips to help them execute advanced strategies.

I know right, you can’t wait to read it? Well, you have to. But I can tell you a little about my chapter – the rest is a closely guarded secret.

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Management is a skill and a great example of nature and nurture coming together as one. In PR, there’s no way to skip straight to management. It’s vocational enough that you simply can’t start delegating without the proper understanding of what you’re asking of people, what you expect from them and, as much as anything, experiencing good and bad management yourself.

But in recent years, other industries have pushed forward with a dynamic that ignores this – the graduate trainee scheme. The idea of these is that if you bring in talent with allegedly great potential and fast track it, you make sure the cream of the crop gets to where it’s needed in your business as quickly as possible.

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Like most people, I like good ideas.

So I was delighted to see this Yo Zuck! Tumblr from “designer and thinker”, Youssef Sarhan, tidily highlighting simple ideas for how he’d improve Facebook. Bit.ly says he’s on 724 clicks at the moment, I’d say he probably has a fair few more on the way.

What’s great here is that Youssef is showing us that he knows his stuff. No need to fluff or gimmicks, just good ideas allowed to speak for themselves.

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For years, the world of PR has played host to aliens from the other side of its universe as journo after journo made the move from Editor to “head of content” or similar.

And while historically there have been leaps in the opposite direction, it’s generally more like a step back to square one on the career snakes and ladders board.

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The best invention since the upside down questionmark.

This time last year, there was some fuss about The SarcMark, a new piece of punctuation designed to make the use of sarcasm explicit by putting a little marker at the end of each relevant sentence.*

Naturally, it was met with near universal derision and ridicule, mainly because it made explicit what anyone with a semblance of intelligence could deduct by themselves.

However, for a while I’ve been watching the way that #client disclosure hashtags are used on Twitter and for me, it kind of twigs some similar concerns.  Tweets like this by .net magazine Editor @DanOliver, and @Wadds‘ little show of hands here present one assortment of views on the matter.

I have something of a different take.

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