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[Originally written, obviously, for the CIPR Friday Roundup .] The Kardashians first appeared in October 2007 just as it was becoming difficult to get a mortgage. I don’t believe the two were related. I also sent out the first Friday Roundup… to eleven recipients. Five years and 250 editions later (missing out the festive seasons), it’s gone out to 9345 of you, which is fantastic. But let’s look at some more interesting October 2007 facts, spanning the full gamut of topics we’ve covered here for PR professionals. Facebook had just passed the thirty million user mark, approaching half that reported by MySpace. There were 350,000 of us on Twitter and ten million odd on LinkedIn – now half a billion and 175 million respectively. There was no Kindle, no Android, no tablets, and no Justin Bieber. Nokia was number one in mobile phones, bigger than numbers 2, 3 and 4 combined. The Blackberry 8800 and the very first iPhone were the executive must-haves. There was no FourSquare, Groupon, Pinterest, Instagram, Angry Birds, Prezi, Quora, Spotify, Mendeley, Blippar, Dropbox, Tweetdeck or Google+. And these were pre-Chatroulette days too, and pre-Barcelona principles come to that. ...

[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .] Identity is not a black and white thing. Sure, at one end of the spectrum anonymity reigns. This is the world of 4chan , the popular image-based bulletin board from which famous memes such as lolcats and Rickrolling emerged. At the other end of the spectrum we have passport border control. And in between we have many shades of identity. Nightclub handstamps for example are needed only to ascertain who has already paid. Many a website cookie serves just to determine if you’ve dropped by before. A supermarket loyalty card serves just to build up an understanding of your shopping habits, and may be associated with a bank card proffered for payment. OK, so what has this got to do with marketing and public relations? ...

“Data is the new oil." So said Clive Humby back in 2006. “Data is the new soil” said David McCandless in 2010. In between, in 2009, Meglena Kuneva , European Consumer Commissioner, said: “Personal data is the new oil of the internet and the new currency of the digital world.” I’ve long been excited about the advent of big data, and started posting about visualising the stuff back in 2008. If anything distinguishes the modern professional – in marketing, PR, HR, R&D, operations, etc. – from her predecessors, it’s the facility to work with data. ...

The latest episode of CIPR TV went out live yesterday afternoon, with plenty of interaction from the audience. The programme’s guests are Jenni Wheller (@jenniwheller ), Internal Communications Manager at SSP UK, and Mike Grafham (@mgrafham ), Head of Customer Engagement at Yammer . I think you’ll agree the audience’s questions and the guests’ responses make for an interesting show. Rather than repeat anything covered in the show, I’ll just take a few paragraphs here to make another observation. ...

The idea of a brand goes back to ancient times when ownership of livestock was asserted by burning one’s mark onto the animal. This post is about a book called Brand Anarchy, so I thought I’d set the scene. The mark would be applied to the animal with a burning stick known as a firebrand. That word has morphed over the years to describe passionate individuals looking to shake things up, so it is then with etymological pleasure that I note the authors of Brand Anarchy are firebrands. ...

A thrill of working in a fast changing market is the opportunity to innovate. A burden of working in a fast changing market is the need to bend existing language to new concepts. And of course, evoking existing language evokes existing meaning … both an advantage and disadvantage. So, we’ve been working with social media for the past decade; as if all preceding media was anti-social. And during the past couple of years, we’ve been tasking our tongue to the topic of social business; as if business previously attracted loners. ...

It’s September already. How did that happen?! As we approach the final quarter of the calendar year, many of us will have our first thoughts of the 2013 planning process. A few will relish the task. Many more will issue a quiet but discernible sigh. But while time is still on our hands, perhaps I can offer up a couple of points to place a refreshing perspective on proceedings. First up, can I ask you what the economy and your particular marketplace will look like this time next year? How about by Easter? Come to that, what will the lie of the land be in January? Who knows! Let’s face it, we live in uncertain times. So having acknowledged our lack of visibility, why do we still pivot our discipline around a yearly plan? What exactly have marketing and public relations got in common with the time it takes the Earth to complete a particular cycle around the Sun anyway? ...

When George W. Bush was inaugurated for his second term in January 2005, no one uploaded a video to YouTube. When Italy beat France to win the 2006 FIFA World Cup final, fans didn’t Tweet. Not once. No one in Europe mentioned it on Facebook. No one captured Fabio Grosso scoring the winner on an iPhone. No one jumped on Gmail to commiserate with French friends. No one used BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) to celebrate with Italian friends. Social media have progressed incredibly quickly and organizations have had to grapple with the challenges and identify and pursue the opportunities. But things began to get serious during 2009 as it became increasingly apparent that social web and related technologies could transform the way organizations go about their business beyond the domains of marketing, public relations and customer service. It might even redefine what it means to be in business. And that’s when we founded the consultancy Influence Crowd. By September 2011, when I had the opportunity to address the executive summit at Dreamforce (the annual Salesforce.com conference), this radical landscape had been labelled with a distinct call to action – socialize the enterprise . ...

Here’s some rather good news to lift some of that post-Olympic blues. The BRANDiD team has won gold, literally. Hundreds of starters were whittled down during recent Seedcamp heats to a couple of dozen top performers. Reading the track perfectly and running a very good race indeed, BRANDiD crossed the finishing line to take its rightful place on the Seedcamp podium – just one of three to make it through the London event. The Seedcamp announcement has just gone live . It’s been six months since we first blogged about our work with BRANDiD , and we’ve been working hard in the Meanwhile gym since then refining our game. And it feels great to take things to the Seedcamp level. ...

[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup .] The headline on my S3 this morning marks a marketing and PR lesson: Cameron urges people to return to capital amid ‘ghost town’ claims . For the past several months, Londoners have been bombarded with messages begging them to adapt their normal routine during the Olympics period, to question their need to travel, to expect over-crowding and travel chaos in so many words. ...