🚀 PR Futurist | #60 | Flipping PR Futurist | 2024 Election trends | Are you utilising the tech you invested in?  5 June 2023

Bluesky at night, is a PR's delight | Stuart Bruce PR Futurist

Stuart has finally got his Bluesky invite and is up and running. What's Bluesky you ask? It's the hot new social media platform from Twitter's co-founder Jack Dorsey. Its invite only status means there is serious FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). When Stuart got his invite there were only about 70,000 users.

He's written about his first impressions of Bluesky, which are favourable, despite it being early days.

If you want an invite for Bluesky, then let us know as we can add you to Stuart's ever-growing list of people wanting one!

Karen Marshall

stuartbruce.biz  

If Twitter dies, where do we find the smart people?

It still appears that rumours of Twitter's imminent demise under Elon Musk's stewardship are premature. One reason for this is it's still where you can find out what the 'smart people' are thinking and engage with them about current issues. Most of the politicians, academics, journalists, campaigners, think tank leaders and more that I know are still just as active on Twitter as they've ever been.

It's mainly the PR/technology/social media chattering classes in the media and on Twitter that are dissing Twitter. Much of the criticism appears to be a dislike of Musk and his politics as it does the reality of the discourse on Twitter. The influx of the far-right appears to be much more of a US phenomenon than in the UK, or indeed elsewhere in the world.

The PR/tech bros think that because US political Twitter is nasty that it's like that everywhere. In the UK I don't see much of it. In fact, none unless I make the effort to find it! About two thirds of Twitter's users are outside of the US bubble.

Stuart Bruce

latimes.com  

Prompts for communicators using the new AI-powered Bing

Microsoft is the big tech company that's leading the charge when it comes to AI, leaving Google and Apple stumbling in its wakes - on technology, practical implementations and ethics.

You'd therefore expect Microsoft's Chief Communication Officer, Frank X Shaw, to have some insight into AI's implications for professional communications and public relations. In this article on the Microsoft blog, he shares suggested prompts and examples of how AI can help with media interview prep, media coverage snapshots, social media inspiration, headline generation and FAQ generation.

Stuart Bruce

microsoft.com  

'Friendly' social media app Nextdoor’s CEO on sexism in Silicon Valley

Great piece on Nextdoor CEO Sarah Friar who although now one of the few female CEOs in Silicon Valley is originally from Northern Ireland. Less than five per cent of the top 150 public tech companies in Silicon Valley have women as CEOs. She talks about what makes geographic community-based social media platform Nextdoor different.

Stuart Bruce

independent.co.uk  

AI from 20,000 feet

In response to the statement this week that AI could lead to an extinction level event for humankind, the popular BBC radio series^ Inside Science hosted a discussion to test the assertion.

Prof Emily M. Bender from the University of Washington along with Dr Stephen Cave, Director at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI) provide interesting perspectives. Prof. Bender is the co-author a critique of Large Language Models (LLMs) which coins the term Stochastic parrot to describe how services such as ChatGTP work.

While we as communicators may not need all the linguistic insight of the paper we certainly need to understand the flaws in the tools we are rapidly adopting into our day-to-day practise.

^ Apologies if you cannot access the programme, it's not always clear what countries the BBC allows to access different programmes.

Tim Bailey

bbc.co.uk