Cambridge Analytica, Huawei and the GDPR, of course, have all helped to bring data privacy into the spotlight and people are becoming more wary of how companies are collecting and using their data (Just check out our client, the Internet Society’s, latest report on consumers’ security concerns with IoT devices – it turns out we think Alexa is pretty creepy!).

And because there is so much of our data stored on the internet – whether it’s on social media or Google, there is also risk of old data being exposed and potentially used against us and out of context – remember when Disney fired (and subsequently re-hired) James Gunn because of decade-old tweets?

Whether we’re worried about how secure our social media account is, where our voice notes are stored in our Alexa, or if we just want to do a bit of a data spring clean, look no further! Because Jumbo is here.

Jumbo is a handy little app that aims to protect your privacy online and there are three ways it can help: it can make your tweets ephemeral by automatically deleting them after a certain period of time, it has a Smart Facebook Privacy Setting which cleans your data on Facebook in a more simple way than Facebook’s own settings, and it can also automatically delete your Google Searches and Alexa recordings.

So the next time the data privacy demons are whispering in your ear, threatening to expose all those times you asked Alexa to play the Vengaboys, make sure you grab your Jumbo app to safeguard your guilty pleasures (and the other important data too).

It’s been on the market a little while now and we’re sure you’ve heard of it (for the savvier amongst you, are already even using it). Still, we feel that BuzzSumo hasn’t quite got the credit it deserves –now tipped by some to be one of THE business tools for 2019, we thought we should help it get a little more recognition.

So then, what is BuzzSumo?

Well, BuzzSumo offers a number of different services, with the overall aim of ensuring that you can most effectively optimise that all-important new marketing strategy for 2019.

Who’s talking about your brand and sharing your content? What are visitors most interested in on your website? BuzzSumo is first and foremost a monitoring tool but there is a lot more it can do. Wish to find out the most talked-about trends and topics in your industry, what kind of content your target audience wants and which influencers you should be in contact and building relationships with? BuzzSumo provides you with a full overview and analysis. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, it also helps give real insight into what your competition is up to.

With this greater understanding, you should be much better equipped to create a great marketing strategy that you now know is guaranteed to perform.

If you’re not already, it may well be time to give it a go.

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When a new technology arises, we like to think that it will change something for the better. Take Facebook, for example. When the social media first came about, the idea was that it would connect us to our friends and family members, solving the issue of maintaining long-distance relationships. No one really expected the impact it would actually have 14 years after it first went live – from hosting inauthentic accounts and pages, to the Cambridge Analytica controversy.

Facebook isn’t the first technology to have an unexpected negative impact and it won’t be the last either. But what if we could predict whether a piece of technology will be disruptive?

That’s where Ethical OS comes in. It’s essentially a toolkit that helps you to see where the potential risks are in a new technology, product or feature. The toolkit looks at eight risk zones, such as addiction and surveillance, and provides a checklist comprised of questions and scenarios to consider the long-term impact of the tech that you’re building.

So, next time you come up with a brand-new piece of tech, try running it past the Ethical OS first to see if it’s really worth following through – it could save a part of society (and your reputation!).

Finding that those group brainstorms are starting to lose their fizzle? Your presentations and decks all seem to be starting to look the same, always reverting back to the same themes, those same stock photos?

When trying to think up and flesh out new ideas, it’s always best to get as many different perspectives and viewpoints as you can, so why not also get AI involved?

We may slightly dismiss AI’s own knack for creativity, but there’s now one AI tool that is helping us to get our creative juices flowing again.

Not exactly an idea generator per se, Yossarian is basically a search engine with a difference, aiming to help expand our ways of thinking through search and AI. It links unusual concepts together to help broaden our thoughts and ideas beyond our usual scope, offering new perspectives and inspiring different ways for looking at and approaching a project.

So, how does it work exactly? Once you’ve signed up for your free account and perhaps given the free tutorials a quick watch, all you need to do is type in a search word to kick off your digital brainstorm. Immediately, Yossarian comes up with multiple, potentially related ideas. Just keep on clicking to generate more ideas that may be of interest, moving from the more literally related concepts to the more lateral and quirky ones, until you have that brainwave.

You can also create custom links between various different ideas, making a note of how they’re connected and changing the images used to illustrate these new ideas, pulling pictures from a range of sources (Getty images, Tumblr etc.).

Once you’ve found those initial ideas that you love, you can then delve deeper, beginning to build them out, clicking on those concepts to find more unusual and interesting connections, perhaps even dropping in other random ideas from elsewhere as well.

This can all also be shared with your colleagues at any time, with Yossarian offering sharing and collaboration tools, granting colleagues the opportunity to brainstorm together and you can even share your ideas boards with the public too.

So, if you’re looking for some help sparking your imagination, it could be time to get your thinking caps on!

Last month, we visited the news:rewired conference and gained some valuable insights into how news and journalism is developing. One of sessions, hosted by Leila Haddou from the Sunday Times shared a list of the great tools out there for the media industry and amongst them we found some goodies. Our favourite and henceforth our Tool of the Month has got to be OpenRefine.

One of the most tedious jobs in the creative industry has got to be data crunching tasks, especially when the data you’re working with is all over the place. Small errors like extra spaces, misspellings and varying abbreviations often go unnoticed in large datasets and you may be missing out on vital stats.

With OpenRefine, the tool can pick up these inconsistencies in the file, so you have a fully reliable dataset ready to crunch. OpenRefine can also transform the format of the data. So, if you were looking at a set of data in a list and you wanted it in table, OpenRefine can do that for you too. Data cleansing has never been so easy!

Yes we know, someone else is trying to get in on the social media scene with ‘something unique’ to offer. Resist the urge to stop reading and turn your attention back to the overflowing portfolio of social sites you might be struggling to keep on top of – new affinity networking tool beBee actually SOLVES the eternal struggle of social media.

Faced with a dilemma of choosing between having a social or professional profile? beBee aims itself at professional users who enjoy a healthy spectrum of hobbies on the side. Its homepage displays feeds from your chosen interest areas (Hives) and suggests new ‘hives’ to follow. We’ve had a quick play of the platform and sure enough beBee is adding new Hives by the day as its user base increases, so you might just be able to find the right thing that scratches your itch!

What’s in it for the communications, PR and marketing professionals? Here’s where beBee might be worth a second glance. With a job search element, communications professionals will be able to exploit this platform to showcase their organisation through job adverts. On a personal level, this will be useful when looking at changing jobs or having a look at vacancies in particular industries.

Only a year old to date, this combination of social and professional networking sets beBee apart from the plethora of social platforms out there and we think there is still much that we can expect to see from beBee. The facts speak for itself – beBee’s user base is steadily creeping up; 2015 saw staggering growth, pushing beBee’s user base up to 9 million, with 25,000 new Bees added per day.

So will this platform overtake LinkedIn as the go-to professional networking site (with a bit of social fun on the side)? We think there’s still a good deal of progress to be made before that happens, especially in terms of content and users, but at the rate it’s going, we’ll definitely bee keeping an eye on it!