The Inbound PR concept is now one year old. Happy birthday to my concept! (Tomorrow is the day!) 

As we've defined before, Inbound PR combines the best of two worlds − public relations and inbound marketing − and alleviates PR's biggest weakness (measurement) and inbound marketing's biggest challenge (content). 

One year deserves a proper celebration so I decided it's time for a monster blog posts of 2,800 words that digs a little deeper into the fundamental principles, tools and tactics of Inbound PR and provides multiple tips. 

For that, I thought I'd use the alphabet since becoming one year old is a good time to start learning the letters and put the basis in place. 

Here we go! 

The ABCs of Inbound PR: 

We live in some pretty turbulent times. Think Brexit, fleeing refugees, bombing all over the world... It's pretty scary out there. 

No wonder then that there's a crisis of leadership that's been going on for years. You want evidence? I've got it for you: the latest annual Leadership Communication Monitor by Ketchum is out and reveals for the fifth year in a row that "a low-trust, high-expectation gap is the new normal for leaders and leadership concerns have a direct, sizable impact on both bottom-line and political outcomes."

It's the fourth time I'm covering the KLCM research.

In 2013, leaders were too stubborn to start embracing change, new media and the digital reality.  

In 2014, the need for a new style of leadership arose – a feminine one.

In 2015, the era of title-less, shared leadership at the speed of now began, where not just CEOs, but anyone in the organisation can be a leader. 

In 2016, a worrying picture of lack of political leadership and some serious blocking barriers to equal corporate leadership arises. 

I got into PR about six years ago. Since then the PR industry has continuously being disrupted. 

That's probably happening to more or less any industry simply because of how fast technology is changing and how quickly ordinary people are embracing digital and are making decisions differently because of digital.

But I haven't seen this being said so much about the other industries as it has been for PR. Google "disruption of public relations" and you'll find multiple articles every year highlighting how PR needs to be disrupted, is ready to be disrupted or better be disrupted with real action. (And the list goes on.)

Fast forward to 2016 and we find the latest Global Communications Report from the Holmes Report pushing that message again — the scale of change is disrupting the PR industry but is PR really able to adapt to this shifting landscape? 

If you work in an agency, I'm sure you've seen people prepare for new business pitches or you've even either been part of one or run one yourself. Maybe even multiple ones. 

That's often the result of an RFP or a Request For Proposal that companies and their marketing people put through when in search of a new agency. 

You'll see a lot of arguments online about this traditional approach to choosing a new agency that has been going on for over 50-60 years and still seems to be the norm although it's hugely outdated. Some argue that this process is a complete waste of time as it's " too slow for a marketing world that functions at the speed of light".

My favourite detractor of RFPs is Blair Enns and all agency best practices he preaches in his book Win Without Pitching. Alone the name of the book explains the need to move away from RFPs and that it is indeed possible to do so. 

But it's one thing for the agency to change its model of how it wins new business, it's another on the client side. Because it's the clients requesting those RFPs and it's the agencies and other marketing professionals who need to re-educate and teach those clients how much more economic and efficient it could be to develop a better way of finding a new agency than with RFPs. 

When we talk about outbound and inbound, this is how you should think about it: outbound means pushing messages out there to journalists or potential customers for volumes-sake so that it goes out and hopefully reaches as many people as possible; inbound means pulling the right people in with relevant messages that they find on their own and choose to consume of their own will whenever they decide to.

That's what's changed over the past few decades ‒ consumers have become far more sophisticated, educated and guarded with devices, tools and apps to ignore you. Or if you do your job well, to pay attention to you.

This is the world we live in ‒ a constant fight for attention because of a complete saturation with content and information everywhere, all the time, from anyone, brands and ordinary people.  

To build a sphere of influence in such a tough environment is a hard job. Usually, that's the job of PR people so I don't envy their new reality. But to stay relevant and manage to break through that attention bubble, PR people need to turn to inbound. They need to combine the good parts of the outbound world and use them for inbound.

Inbound PR focuses on all things digital across paid, earned, social and owned media (PESO) and with this post I want to show you a few ways in which you can turn traditional PR activities into Inbound PR activities. Here we go.