Great new campaign from Intel. The campaign features prominent Intel employees, though in this video it’s not really Ajay Bhatt (co-inventor of the USB), but an actor playing him. Apparently walking into a room was a little more acting thatn this Intel Fellow could muster .

I just came across this post on Inside Facebook on how one can protect their privacy on Facebook. I’ve always been amazed at people that put their birthday on their Facebook page as that is one of the three keys that can be used to steal your identity (the other two being your social security number and mother’s maiden name).

Take a look when you have some time.

What will all the social media folks do? Pick up the phone? Send an e-mail? Or worse yet, get up and walk over to see their colleague to talk live? Will they speak in 140-character sentences?

Many of you who know my wife and me, know of our love for China – our precious daughter, Christina, is Chinese. It is because of our love of the country, its respect for it’s elderly, its strong family bonds, cultural flavor and wonderful food that I pause every time I come across an article or blog post related to the country.

@Shelisrael on Twitter this evening tweeted a link to an article that is based on an interview of an individual who is considered China’s first blogger and first appeared in the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper. The article is entitled “China’s first blogger on the Chinese blogosphere.”

Isaac Mao, who recently spoke at the Guardian’s Future of Journalism Conference, discusses “his six years of blogging in the P.R.C., touching on the topics of personal publishing in China, censorship, his experience getting ‘harmonized,’ the interaction between social media and mainstream media, Google’s missteps in China, online fame, privacy issues and the overall impact blogging is having on Chinese people and Chinese society at large.”

It’s a fascinating read – give it a read when you have a moment.

My day-job gives me the opportunity to play with social media stuff, learn of new tools and blog about what I’ve learned. Our Chief Marketing Officer recently gave me the challenge of learning Jott and blogging on it as an example of the types of services that are available and are built on servers and storage that my company provides. My previous post here was me playing around with the service. Here’s the post as it appeared in it’s entirety on our internal Marketing blog.

*************************************************

If you watched the video-based CliffsNotes version of Mark’s presentation (this linked to an internal presentation not available to you) on The Connected Era last week, he spoke on five aspects of how our lives and our industry are changing. One of the points he made was that increasingly we have access to everything online in real time. His example of a service that enables that was jott.com.

I had seen an article or two on the service but to be honest was a bit leery of signing up for yet another service – even a free one like jott. I was also a bit cautious of talking internally about using a Dell-issued cell phone for this sort of thing but quickly began to realize just how helpful this would be on my personal, family phone. I reached out to my internal network but wasn’t able to find a true jott guru, so I began using the service myself.

Here’s my story — give me a little grace as I’ve only been using it for a short time.

Someone sent me a link to a post by the folks at Duct Tape Marketing that said the following:  “There was a great movie years ago called Night Shift (1982). In it, Michael Keaton’s character carried around a mini tape recorder to capture his brilliant business ideas. One of my favorites was “Feed Mayonnaise to Tuna Fish” – something about making better tuna sandwiches – but I digress!”

The problem with this is that the device was tape-based, and would require him to listen to it and then transcribe it back to himself later.

Well, essentially, jott is like Michael Keaton’s tape recorder on steroids. You can use it to send yourself an e-mail message or reminder, add To-Do items to your action list, send a status update to your Twitter account, update a blog post (WordPress, Blogger etc.) or send a message to a group of individuals. If you’ve got a team of people you frequently work with, you can use it to send a message to them by simply dialing just one phone number.

If you go to lifehacker, a site that “provides tech tricks, tips and downloads for getting things done,” they’ve got a great overview of exactly what you can do with jott.

I came across one blog where a guy named Eddie Mikell used jott to blog his way across the United States with his wife. Very cool and the voice recognition capabilities are incredible.

To sign up for the free service, go to www.jott.com, fill out a couple of fields, enter your mobile phone number, call in to register your number and you’re ready to jott.

The folks at Jott.com have a blog where they give real-world examples of their service and you can also follow them on their Twitter account. You can also check out videos and other information on their community page.

Let us know if you’re a jott power user and how you’ve used the service at Dell or in your personal life. If you’ve found other Connected Age services that you think would be helpful to your marketing colleagues, add a comment below.

I was invited to participate in a conference focused on the art of internal communications with some old colleagues from Insidedge, experts in internal communications and the consultants who helped make my company’s cultural campaign real. It was an excellent opportunity to get away from the ‘tyranny of the urgent’ and share ideas and best practices with others. My former manager Bernie Charland (blog: Public Relations Rogue) and I were able to attend last year’s conference in New York and this year’s took place just three hours away in Dallas.

I learned quite a bit from the other attendees and realized that for all the frustrations I have, my current employer really has a lot of good things going on. We’re actively listening to employees about what they like and don’t like, just as my cohorts on the external side are actively listening to what our customers have to say. It’s refreshing to see how closely aligned we are on how we’re behaving on the external and internal fronts as in many companies, external leads and internal simply follows. In my case, internal is clearly leading the way.

Keith Burton and the entire Insidedge team has launched a blog called Intake, that will facilitate conversations specific to internal communications. Good luck, Keith and thank you for your letting me be part of Mindshare 2008 — it was excellent.

If you like the “status updates” feature of Facebook and are addicted to seeing what your friends are doing at each minute of the day, you’ll love Twitter. But, I’d like to suggest that Twitter is more than just a toy to track friends but can be a powerful tool for networking, for keeping in touch with friends all over the world and for certain aspects of one’s job. Tapping the simplicity again of the folks at The Commoncraft Show, I’ve pasted below a short vlog on how Twitter works. Think of it as an RSS feed of what your friends and colleagues, even some people you may not know personally, are doing throughout the day. Once you’ve signed up for Twitter, you can use a cool little desktop applet called Twhirl that allows you to have a window of tweets from all of your friends in front of you. If you want to follow me, my Twitter profile is bruceericatdell.

Have a look.