6 useful iPad apps for communicators

Did you recently buy an iPad and wonder what apps may be out there to help you with your work as a communicator? Based on my personal experience, I find the following six apps useful:

Reading online content: Pulse reader

You will need some sort of reader that lets you browse content relevant for your job in an easy and convenient way. Pulse reader does this quite nicely and offers you the option of sharing stories on Facebook and Twitter directly out of the app. You can add any RSS feed to the Pulse reader and define your own categories to maintain an overview of your feeds.

Organizing information and saving it to read later: Instapaper

Sometimes, you don’t have the time to read a story right when you find it, and you want to read it at a later stage. Instapaper lets you save stories and makes them available for reading whenever you find the time. The app displays the content in a clean and visually appealing layout. You can also create folders and organize your online content for future reference. Plus, you can save stories to Instapaper from any browser.

Taking notes: Noteshelf

Noteshelf is a virtual notepad and works best with a stylus (i.e. a special sort of pen that allows handwriting on capacitive displays). I used Noteshelf to take study notes during a recent course, and I found the app to be working really well. You can create multiple notebooks and export your notes as PDF or graphic file either via email or directly to a cloud storage service such as Dropbox. Important to know: The app doesn’t offer text recognition for your handwriting. Your notes are stored and can be exported in a graphic format, not as a text file.

Organizing thoughts, ideas and projects: iThoughts

To me, mind mapping is a great method of structuring my thoughts for a wide range of situations, such as planning a project, outlining a story, or developing a communication strategy. iThoughts is easy to use and lets you save your mind maps in different formats that can be further used and edited in various mind mapping programs on your Mac or PC. The app also offers different options to format your mind maps by adding colors, pictures etc.

Read, organize and annotate PDF files: iAnnotate

If you want to put an end to paper prints and use your iPad to read and annotate PDF documents, then iAnnotate may offer a solution. The app lets you organize your PDF files in folder structures and gives you different tools to highlight important parts of your documents and add comments to your files. To me, the experience iAnnotate offers comes closest to printing out a text and adding comments and highlights using a pen.

Writing copy: iA Writer

When I write a text on my iPad, I like to keep things simple. Even though you can get fully fledged text editor apps, I opted for iA Writer: No formatting, no layout – just bringing the right words in the right order. iA Writer is a text editor that’s deliberately kept as simple as possible – removing anything that could distract you from your words. It’s a great tool if you need to be fully focusing on the copy, and it’s best used with an external keyboard.

Surely, you will have additional apps to support you in your communication work – for instance to manage your profiles on Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms. And maybe you even want to take content creation on the iPad beyond writing the occasional story and start cutting your videos with iMovie and editing your pictures with iPhoto (I personally still prefer a laptop for such tasks). You may also want to use your iPad to record interviews or focus groups (I prefer to use a dedicated recording device for this, but the iPad does offer recording functionality). Also, you may work at an employer that offers a secure solution to access your work email and other documents on your iPad.

I hope you’ll find the above tips useful. If you have further apps that help you in your work as a communicator, please let me know.

How communication helps keeping information safe

I recently wrote a guest article for Simply Communicate on how UBS is using communications to foster information security and data privacy. You can read the article – including 5 tips to make your information security program more engaging – on simply-communicate.com.

Read the article

3 things to keep in mind about the legal aspects of social media

I recently attended a very interesting training session about the legal aspects of social media. The participants – all communications professionals dealing with different aspects of social media  - wanted  to learn how to reap the benefits of social media while making sure to stay out of legal trouble.

It became clear very quickly that the legal situation around social media isn’t as clear-cut as one may hope. In fact, very few court decisions have been taken on social media-related legal disputes so far. At least that’s the case for Switzerland, but I imagine the situation to be not too different in other countries. This means there are very few, if any, cases that can serve as a reference.

It became apparent that the best you can aim for when using social media is to be in a relatively safe and strong position should there be a legal case. This, of course, means that a residual risk remains. And it’s this residual risk that prevents large organizations from becoming more actively involved in social media.

In most large firms, the legal department has the task to assess the legal risks of the firm’s behavior. By its nature, the legal department will always try to rule out risks if it sees a way to do so. This makes sense, because once a paralegal approves a certain behavior and it leads to a legal case, it’s normally his or her job that’s on the line.

Since the use of social media (and other forms of communications for that matter) will inevitably cause a residual risk, Legal will always struggle with approvals. I think you could argue that it’s not fair for the legal person to bear the residual risk. But the way organizations are usually set up, it’ll be Legal who will face the consequences, even if the communications manager is willing to bear the risk.

So as a communicator, how do you get your organization more involved in social media? Executive buy-in and sponsorship. Only if a member of the top management is willing to be fully accountable for the residual risk associated with the use of social media, the communications department will be in a position to integrate those channels in the communications mix.

When it comes to legal aspects of social media, keep in mind that:

1. The law isn’t as clear-cut as one might think (or hope);
2. Someone has to be willing to bear the residual risk;
3. This person has to be someone from the organization’s leadership.