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...

I don't have an Instagram account. But I have friends in the public relations industry who do, and use them often. They're smart professionals. So I assume they realize that Instagram doesn't make money by hosting their gee-whiz edited photos of their trip to Savannah. It makes money by harvesting data from photos, including the metadata it contains. Your smartphone's camera adds metadata to your photos. It knows where and when you captured the photo. The exposure, the brand of camera, etc. And I'm certain Facebook -- owners of Instagram, you'll recall -- understands how to sift out important information from your photos. And re-sell that information to its advertisers. The PR business is about influencing people's attitudes. What do you and I care about? How can PR people and marketers use that knowledge to influence users' attitudes and behaviors? I'm not a fool. Google does this sort of data-mining with all my searches. When I was looking ...