Your PR Architect

By Drapplesi (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons This isn't a rant. It's not a diatribe. It's simply my point of view. I don't carry a smartphone. They're easy to get and operate. But I resist using one. Why? Because it quickly becomes an intruder in my real life. And, if we're having a conversation, it's intruding in your life, too. I believe in the art of listening over the artifice of texting. I believe in building relationships between placing my order and the arrival of the meal. I believe in eye contact, not eyestrain. And I find the creepy blue glow of a smartphone casts an unflattering pallor over the face of the person using the phone. In a dim restaurant, it looks like a scene from "The Walking Dead." Yick. Yes, I've used Yelp to help me find interesting restaurants. But I don't want Yelp to tell me whether...

Which Rochester ad agency didn't get the message about distracted driving? The Rochester Advertising Council's 2013 campaign "Yeah, You're that Distracting" has helped make motorists aware that texting while driving can have fatal results. It convinced me that multitasking behind the wheel was a great way to wreck a car, and likely injure someone. But their great campaign doesn't stop outdoor advertising initiatives like this one: The photo isn't mine. Someone -- perhaps a local TV journalist -- grabbed this image with a smartphone and posted it to a social media feed. I'm betting many other motorists did the same thing, and maybe even added a snarky comment. Free publicity? Sure. And Twitter users' tendency to repost and add their own comments are likely to give the athletic club's modest two-billboard campaign a broader reach than they'd have earned if they'd purchased 10 normal billboards. However: campaigns like this...