An ex-journo colleague tells me hacks don’t like sterile working conditions. They hate the silence of the office and the fact that PRs collude in that silence by doing everything by email or Twitter.

Apparently, some PRs actually try to drive more conversations onto email. One journalist, I shall refer to him only as Pint of Guinness, outlined his biggest gripe with modern PRs. “After I’d spent two minutes explaining something to this girl, she asked me to type it all out in an email for her.”

Over the past few months I’ve begun to notice something sinister in some of the social media training sessions I’ve been giving. No, it’s not Gollum sitting in the corner, but something far worse. In fact, if left unchecked it threatens to ruin the public face of some of the larger corporates we know. Indeed, it appears the F-Factor is spreading through firms like bindweed and choking their creativity.

Most mainstream film studios and distributors have embraced social media, but what are they gaining from it?

Watching movies at the cinema is an inherently social experience increasingly reflected across platforms and sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Even US trade magazine Box Office Magazine has anticipation and appreciation indexes based on Facebook likes and tweets. The principal reason is to raise awareness as part of a marketing campaign, but looking at two different types of releases use social media can be revealing.

The opportunistic violence that we've seen on the streets of London over the past few days has no place in today's society and for those of us who are proud Londoners brings shame upon the nation's capital.