When I was in my first year at university, I fell in love with marketing and communications and specifically, PR.

This was unusual as I was doing a BA in International Business and most students with such a degree tend to choose finance or consulting as a career.

But authors like Brian Solis and David Meerman Scott helped me make my choice.

I decided to follow their footsteps and set myself a goal: One day, I will publish a book about PR with Wiley.

Little did I know that eight years later, I'd achieve my goal.

How did I do it? By starting a blog in that first year of university.

As I didn't study PR, a blog was the best way to develop writing skills that are so crucial for PR. Also, social media and SEO are another set of skills you need so that you can spread the word about your blog and have a readership.

But what was crucial was that I didn't give up. It was hard, it was time-consuming to do on top of all of your responsibilities but 7+ years later, I still keep publishing content once a week.

It's discipline and persistence that are required for remarkable content.

Everyone is a project manager. Even if your job title or job description doesn't contain 'project management', you still manage projects in your professional and personal lives all the time.

Think about it: planning your next trip or your wedding is very much a project so is the launch of a new product or a service or simply the process of planning and executing the next meeting you have to run. 

So what is a project? 

A project is a certain outcome or a task that is timebound and has an end game to it - something you're aiming to achieve. 

I've been running projects my entire life - moving to Germany, UK and then Ireland were all projects so were my dissertations about PR and social media for sustainability as well as all beauty blogger campaigns I run when I was working in my previous PR agency and now so are the multiple things that I do in my current Program Management job that by definition is all about managing multiple global projects at the same time. 

It took me a while to figure out how to excel as a program manager without formal project management education. If you've never run a project at work, it's helpful to start with an understanding of what project management is in the first place and what are the key methodologies that will help you make a decision on how to run your project.

Republished with permission from ITPR's blog. 

Inbound PR has changed the way we deliver campaigns for the better. Whether it’s being able to track and present our results or the way we interact with journalists, we’ve seen a significant uptick in PR results and, more importantly, client happiness!

As we’ve spoken about before, the concept has had a profound effect in generating new business, but there are still a few challenges with Inbound PR that we’ve seen cropping up again and again when trying to implement Inbound PR campaigns. 

What is Inbound PR? 

Inbound PR is an evolution of traditional PR in an effort to keep up with constant changes in the digital age. While traditional PR has purely relied on coverage to prove its worth, Inbound PR goes beyond that to delve deeper into the metrics and outcomes that help meet business goals.

Don’t get me wrong – any PR campaign should aim to get you a bucketful of coverage, but if you’re not tracking who’s clicked through to your website as a result of that coverage, how will you be able to prove the effect of it?

Over the years, I've been called a machine, a rocket, a powerhouse, a bulldog, and all of these with a positive connotation thanks to my endless energy and ability to get a lot of things done in a short amount of time. 

Many people have asked me how I do it and how I continue to do it consistently. 

I always say I have developed very good time management, organisation and planning skills over the years and use the right tools for me to help me. For example, my Google calendar is my project management tool that more or less owns my professional and personal lives.

I block time not just for my meetings but also for the things that I need to get done such as projects or certain action items as well my personal engagements like coffee or dinner meet-ups with friends, travel plans etc. I even colour code my calendar so just with a quick glance I know if my week or day is full of meetings or space to work on projects or a ton of personal engagements. 

Everything is in my calendar. If it's not there, it's not going to happen.

However, in addition to these skills, constantly being able to push forward and to do more comes with intrinsic motivation - basically the desire to do something. 

And that's based on inspiration.

Mary Meeker's 2019 Internet Trends report is out. 

333 pages full of insights around internet users and usage, e-commerce, advertising, work, education, freemium business models and more.

It's pretty detailed and there's so much to learn.

I've gone through the whole report and wanted to share some of the things that stood out to me. 

Before I go into the facts and learnings, I want to share this quote which I believe is very relevant to today's business and consumer reality, and specifically, businesses need to pay serious attention to this because few are living and breathing this: 

Now onto the learnings.