That ‘someone’ is Roger D’Aprix, a man who IABC named as “one of the most influential thinkers in the communication profession in the last 25 years.” We have one coincidence in our professional lives in that we both worked for William M Mercer (as it was then called, today known simply as Mercer), the actuaries and human resources management consultants, at the same time in the early 1990s, on different sides of the Atlantic.

Among many things, Roger is the author of seven books, one of which – Communicating for Change: Connecting the Workplace with the Marketplace, published over a decade ago – is the business book I have referenced most in my professional life, even today.

So I was thrilled to be able to speak to Roger as co-host of Cafe2Go, the IABC podcast, for the August interview edition, which I’ve just published on the podcast blog.

If you’re involved in employee communication, I’m sure you’ll find the primary topic of our conversation pretty interesting. Here’s the run-down of what we talked about in our 20-minute conversation:

[…] Among his many contributions to IABC is authorship of The Face-to-Face Communication Toolkit: Creating an Engaged Workforce, the second edition of which has been published. The first edition, published in 2004, has been one of IABC’s best-selling publications.

In this interview, Roger talks with Cafe2Go co-host Neville Hobson, ABC, about the toolkit, what’s changed in the five years since the first edition, how the nature of face-to-face communication has changed in recent years especially with the advent of social media, tips on communication strategies to foster employee engagement and rebuild trust, plus some advice to those who say they have little or no time for face-to-face communication.

Worth a listen (click that link to retrieve the MP3, or you can listen right here with the Flash player at the top if you see it), even if you’re not involved in employee communication.

See what you can learn.

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I’m also starting to be a big fan of Dropbox, a new collaborative document sharing service that’s just come out of private beta which I signed up for a few days ago.

It’s so simple and easy to use that I could see this being a more useful collaborative tool for me than Live Mesh.

This screenshot shows my Dropbox home page on the web. Yet that’s not the place I’d visit much as the desktop app Dropbox installs lets me drag and drop files using Windows Explorer just as I can do with any folder on the computer.

Live Mesh is like this, too.

I can add files and folders into a public folder and then provide unique URLs for specific files that enable anyone not connected to me in Dropbox to access those file. That’s a useful feature.

I’m not sure whether comparing Dropbox with Live Mesh is a valid comparison or not. I’ll come to some conclusions after using both for a while.

So planning a more detailed commentary over on my tech blog soon.

Meanwhile, check Dropbox out for yourself, especially the screencast – it’s good and explains the concepts very well.

Dropbox runs on Windows (XP and Vista) , Mac and Linux systems which pretty much covers it all.

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Is it true? asks Richard, who proceeds to answer his own question:

Richard posted a snippet from a Business Wire email:

That snippet sounds a lot like the social media release, of which much debate continues and which has yet to gain wide acceptance.

I think the SMR should and could play a significant role in communication outreach as the structure and format that’s developing is, in my view, far more useful to both the creators and the consumers of the content.

But in terms of traditional press releases, I’d agree with Richard’s view in the sense that Business Wire is a conduit for mass dissemination of news/information generated by others.

In the case of Techmeme, if a story is noticed by whatever means Techmeme uses to notice such things, that story will get into Techmeme no matter the source – Business Wire, the originator, whoever.

That’s how it’s supposed to work, right?

Richard also makes some good points on what he sees as journalism’s (and blogging’s) value-add.

The best part of his post, though, is this quote from Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera:

A definition for today!

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