In our work we spend a lot of time sending written documents back and forwards with our clients, and sometimes email just doesn’t cut it, especially if we want to send large documents or collaborate on writing.

Luckily there is a huge range of free, online tools to help make it easier to share information and collaborate online. Here’s a good list of some useful services …read more>>

Following on from our previous post on PR measurement, here’s a great piece from 2009 from American PR guy Don Bartholomew on five things to forget and five things to learn when measuring PR work.

Didn’t make the just-completed PRINZ annual conference this year, but this conference take-out is a useful reference: Six golden rules for media and PR measurement.

With online communications becoming increasingly crucial in the PR toolkit, new jobs are appearing to cater for it.

Ever heard of a “Conversation Auditor”? Me neither, but what a great idea: a purely online conversation mining and tracking role.

The title is so new, it only seems to pop up on one blog (the Social Path), though many U.S firms already employ people to do similar work.

It is one of the first of a whole raft of roles springing out of the social media industry.

What about “Community Catalyst” (helping communities communicate online) and “Digital Customer Service Specialist” (provide customer service through online tools).

Welcome to cyber-communications!

Opt-in PR: letting the media actually choose if they want to receive information from a PR agency.

Kinda sounds like a death knoll to all us hardworking PRs working to get our clients noticed (!), but a PR guy in the U.S is banking his business on it and, so far, reportedly, has had 165 media outlets signing up.

The gourmet food publicist clearly has a good feel for the taste of his media contacts.

How do you find and track yourself or your business online? How do you manage your online reputation?

With the online world a key environment for spreading PR messages, it is essential to be able to track those messages as well as their responses and any other mentions and conversations about your business.

Here’s an article detailing eight good tools for tracking stuff online and here’s another social media tracking tool.

And this tool — uberVU — is so new it hasn’t  even had its public beta release yet! But it’s already getting good press. It tracks conversations wherever they go on the web and then let you reply to, and manage, them from one place.

Now that sounds very promising: convergence of social media , we need that.

Here’s an interview with uberVU’s founders: