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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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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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An interesting Tweetversation has been going on between a couple of leading UK tech journos Chris Davies (from SlashGear) and Mic Wright (freelancer for the likes of Wired & co.)

Check it out below (starting from the bottom)

The article they’re discussing is written by Philip Berne and a great example of the longer format of IT journalism that seems relatively rare in the sea of news that keeps the scene ticking over.

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As you may have heard, last week my agency Wildfire PR released some social media research which saw some pretty excellent pickup all over the place.

As PRs, we’re all pretty used to the value of good coverage- traditionally,  it’s one of the great magical currencies of what we do and a satisfying achievement.  But it’s easy to start seeing it in pragmatic terms as a commodity listed in Excel, meeting targets and making clients happy.  It’s easy to lose sight of what coverage may mean to clients, not just in the marketing department but for everyone from the founders downwards.

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<< Crossposted from my post on the official Wildfire PR blog. Because I like it. >>

If one thing has become clear in the last few weeks, it’s that everyone loves the Old Spice guy.  He sprung out of nowhere, posted some clever YouTube videos and we all had a good time.

But social media was supposed to be about more than this.  It was supposed to make companies more transparent and usher in a new age of true public relations – it was supposed to save the world!

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