Last week's Friday Roundup focused on the ramifications of the Semantic Web, so-called Web 3.0, on the marketing and PR professions. So perhaps you'll forgive me if I push my luck by talking tech two weeks running.

The Internet of Things changes many aspects of our lives, including the possibilities and practice of the influence professions; marketing and PR. What is it? Well, you can think of it as a network of objects beyond the usual computers and smartphones, for example:

  • The device containing electronics in order to fulfil its primary function (eg, washing machine, car, aircon unit)
  • The electrical device traditionally absent of sophisticated electronics (eg, lighting, heating, power distribution)
  • Non-electrical objects (eg, food and drink packages, animals, clothing); and
  • Environmental sensors (eg, for variables such as temperature, heat and moisture).

And just like the Semantic Web, the Internet of Things isn't just some futurologist's dreamscape. It is here, now.

Walmart and Tesco adopted technology allowing them to track products (the non-electrical items in the bullet list above) as early as 2003. Fiat has enabled customers of some of their vehicles to upload data collected by their car and describing their driving style and history since 2008. Over a third of a million patients in the US have devices implanted that send information back to their healthcare specialist.

If you want to understand how your company should be approaching the Internet of Things from an influence perspective, there's no better place to start than finding out more about the Internet of Things itself.

So if you're in London Tuesday evening, come along to the Mashup Event. I'm in the chair and our panellists will be delighted to answer your questions.

Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.

B2B Marketer Online Prospecting Preferences

by David H Deans of Digital Lifescapes

eMarketer reports that business-to-business (B2B) sales cycles are longer than a year ago, but sales pipelines are growing, according to the results of a market study by OneSource.

Traditional outbound prospecting still produces the most qualified leads for U.S. B2B sales representatives, but companies are relying more on their corporate Website to attract new customers. Social networking sites were rated toward the low end of the scale -- though they were as helpful in lead generation as direct mail. More...

The Future of Marketing Starts with Publishing Part 2

by Brian Solis of PR 2.0

As social media moves from the edge to the center of adoption and practice, the future of marketing hinges on the ability for brands to evolve from the broadcasting of one-to-many sales and marketing messages to an authentic media company that creates and publishes meaningful and timely content. In Part 1, we examined the idea that every company is a media company: EC=MC, the various forms of pervasive media in the social Web, the need for editorial calendars, and how through the creation and proliferation of social objects, businesses could earn awareness and presence. More...

CIPR’s social media panel sign of CIPR modernisation

by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications

The first meeting of the CIPR’s social media panel took place last week. There’s an announcement about the panel, its make-up and its remit on the CIPR web site. I was pleased to accept an invitation to join the group. You can follow the work of the panel on Twitter via the hashtag #ciprsm – and @ciprsocialmediapanel is a Twitter account that is following the members of the panel and aggregating their Twitter feeds.

I let my membership of the CIPR lapse five years ago after former director general Colin Farringdon dismissed the potential of blogs and social media. More...

The Future of Marketing Starts with Publishing Part 1

by Brian Solis of PR 2.0

I recently called for businesses to broaden their perspective of Social Media from an experimental stage of acting and reacting, to one of learning and leading through intelligence, participation, and also publishing. Creating social profiles and broadcasting tweets and status updates is elementary, whereas creating a meaningful presence through the development and dissemination of remarkable content is judicious.

What lies ahead is an inflection point in the maturation of social media, publishing, marketing and communications. More...

Smoking Skills Beatbox is a clever video to support an important cause

by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott

I love this video.

Smoking Skills is a hip and fresh approach to raise awareness for the dangers of smoking amongst urban teens.

The video is directed by Michael Krivicka from New York City and features legendary beatbox artist Kenny Muhammad.

Michael sent me a link to this video ten minutes ago when it had just 13 views. As I blog it the video has 27 views. My guess is that it will have many many more views in the days and weeks to come. Great work Michael.

Direct link to video. More...

Amazon poison pen reviews and why its no longer possible to remain anonymous online

by Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications

Proponents of social media have been quiet on the Orlando Figes case leaving mainstream media to pick up the story. The Times leader writer and columnist Oliver Kamm has penned an analysis for the story. The case of the Birkbeck College professor and celeb-historian that admitted posting anonymous and often hostile reviews on Amazon shows that it is increasingly impossible to be anonymous on the internet – even when you try as hard as Figes.

Here’s why:

Social pressures – speculation and ego are a potent combination that tests the conscience of even the most devious anonymous commentator. More...

Are PR people the main readers of UK online IT news publications? Google thinks so.

by Andrew Smith of escherman

Google has just updated its Doubleclick Ad Planner tool with a useful new feature that shows a site’s top 10 audience interests, representing the aggregate interests of the site’s visitors. As Google says: “In these top 10 lists, each interest is assigned an affinity score, such as 3.9x, which means visitors to the site are that many more times likely to be interested in the topic than the average Internet population."

I tried it out on a couple of UK online IT news sites – More...

Big Ideas use lower budgets!

by Sofia Bento of Blogal strategies of brands

What can you do if you're low on your publicity budget, but still want to access as many people as you can with your message?

Harley Davidson made it quite simple:

ChatRoulette consists of randomly connecting you and someone somewhere in the world using a connected webcam and allowing you to talk to a stranger. You never know who you are going to be talking to. Some 500,000 people connect daily to ChatRoulette, so it's quite popular.

We don't need to have money to make big campaigns. More...