With the global adoption of digital, a lot has been said about the PR industry. Unfortunately, not always positive.

Take, for example, keeping up with social media and online channels to develop appropriate skills and offer the type of services that clients nowadays need has been a painful challenge. Not to mention then measurement which has been PR's biggest problem since its very existence.  

So how does PR stay relevant? 

To figure this out, we need to first analyse our current reality. 

When we think about the past two decades, there are two key things brands and their PR people need to consider:

• Our consumer and purchasing behaviours have changed, massively.
• If you don’t have an online presence, you don’t exist.

Let’s start with the first one.

2017 or not, the agency-client war still persists. 

Agencies want to be responsible for more, marketers don't trust them to let them. 

That's the major finding in a recent study done in the US but I think it's quite relevant for the rest of the world as well.  

Marketers at clients complain that agencies lack technical and data-savvy teams who can work on their accounts and that too many agencies still haven't transitioned from old media to new, lacking the expertise clients need in the digital age. 

Agencies, on the other hand, say that clients are unwilling to become true partners by taking work in-house that really should be done by the agency team and so showing a disrespectful unwillingness to commit to quality work. 

If you look at the comments below, you'll see how the language both parties use is rather judgemental and certainly doesn't show that they see the other counterpart as a partner: 

By 2017, video content will represent 74% of all internet traffic.

I can't say that I'm surprised. 

Visual content was the biggest marketing trend for me for 2016. There were a lot of people and businesses jumping on it, particularly on the use of video or social networks that support videos and cool visuals such as Snapchat and Instagram. 

We've heard a lot about video during INBOUND16 as well where visuals and video were prominent more or less in every talk. 

Venngage went a step further and gathered the insights from marketing people about visual trends and put the results into a handy infographic that I want to show you today. (Disclaimer: I took part in the survey too.)

Here are some of the most interesting findings: 

When I started working on the Inbound PR concept, my initial thought was that PR pros are really great at content creation and storytelling but they were pretty bad at measurement. I remember that from my days working in the industry.

On the other hand, inbound marketing people are well versed in data and numbers - this is what I saw from working with hundreds of agencies as a consultant at HubSpot. 

Then I decided to dig into the two disciplines. 

What's Public Relations? 

As per definition, public relations is the strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between an organisation and its publics. This comes from the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) which is the leading PR organisation in the world.

The Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) in the UK – the other leading PR body – argues that:

"Public relations is about reputation - the result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you. Public relations is the discipline which looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics."

As you can see from the definitions, PR is all about reputation and engaging in meaningful relationships with various publics.

My blog just turned five. Can you believe it? I can't! When did this happen? Time really flew by. 

But I've learned a lot, I've experienced a lot and I've met some amazing people. 

Blogging is one of the best ways to develop new skills and to think.

Seriously, that last part sounds weird but it's true.

For me, putting things into words on the screen is the absolute best way to think through and reflect, to gather my thoughts, to analyse them, to put them into structured, sense-making expressions and then to develop new ideas. 

It's the best way to come up with something. It's how Inbound PR was born - through writing. 

Blogging is an immense way to expand your thought process and your knowledge because by researching a topic you want to cover you learn new things and by writing about it you fully develop a knowledge bank. 

Then comes, of course, your own brand building. Blogging is fantastic for that but only when you do it right. 

And this is what I want to share with you today - my 5 key learnings from 5 years of blogging - that will help you get started and build your own brand through blogging. 

5 Key Learnings from 5 Years of Blogging: