On Thursday evening, I had the pleasure of meeting Stephen Waddington. It was an inspiring dinner of intellectual curiosity and thought-proving stories and conversatios. I think we both learnt a lot from each other.

Of course, we spent most of the evening talking about the PR industry and our experiences over the years and I kind of got to pitch my concept of Inbound PR and how the inbound methodology is the perfect fit for PR.

There are two main reasons, I said, why inbound is the perfect fit for PR:

1. PR people are natural content creators and storytellers.
2. PR people suck at measurement.

If you are familiar with the inbound marketing methodology, you will see that content is at the centre of inbound (refer to this page to learn more about it). And content is something that PR people do better than anyone in the creative industry – marketers, advertisers or digital experts.

However, the single biggest challenge that PR pros have been facing since forever is measurement. Just google PR measurement and you’ll see tons of articles explaining how AVEs don’t work, we need a new set of tools, how PR hasn’t adjusted to the new era of digital and metrics etc. (See here, here and here for example.)

Inbound makes measurement possible. Inbound also doesn’t work without content.

But there’s even more.

It was the first time I had ever participated in a digital-only congress and it was great fun. How it works you ask? Well, it’s online only – you sign up in order to watch the live broadcasts of the presentations on the designated date and time, and you participate in a live chat after each presentation.

I was invited as a speaker by one of the agencies I take care of at HubSpot (they organise the event) as they noticed that my background was social media and PR and I had written a dissertation and a book on the topic, so they thought it would be quite useful for the participants to learn more about this.

You can still watch the video here, but I thought I'd share the slides of my presentation with you as they very much summarise my findings from back then, adding up some more research and still making the point that PR pros are unfortunately slow to catch up with all that’s being happening in the realm of social media, 10+ years later.

I started university again this week. Yes, I did. As busy as I am at work, or perhaps at work and in my free time as I am a bit of a workaholic, I have this innate need to always learn and grow. And because I am driven to succeed in my career, I felt it was important to start preparing for the next step – and so I began a part-time Professional Diploma in Management at the Dublin Business School.

On Wednesday, I had my first lecture, which I thought was a great start. We delved into leadership and particularly the differences between leadership and management.

It was an inspiring evening of learning and reflection for me that got me writing this blog post and creating the infographic on the differences between a leader and a manager below.

The key learning really is that leadership and management are fundamentally different, but they often need to go hand in hand.

Warren Bennis distinguishes both explaining that “To manage means to bring about, to accomplish, to have charge of or responsibility for, to conduct. Leading is influencing, guiding in a direction, course, action, opinion.” He also says that both are important.

After being away for two weeks – first at INBOUND15 in Boston, then at dmexco in Cologne – I had so many things  to take care of so I used my weekend to deal with some urgent emails and to catch up with my reading: there were about 350 unread articles among the 40 subscriptions that I have in my feedly.

I’ve managed to get down to 88 articles now, so this was a productive learning weekend.

Anyway, there were so many good articles which I thought would be useful for the other Channel Consultants in my team at HubSpot so I emailed them a list of 10 fantastic reading recommendations.

Then I thought, these articles would surely be of interest to my readers too and so I decided to share them with you as well. I hope you enjoy them and they inspire a powerful start to your working/study week.

10 Reading Recommendations to Power up Your Week:

#1: The Most Common Mistakes Companies Make with Global Marketing

This is some fantastic advice from our very own Nataly Kelly – our VP of Marketing Localisation at HubSpot – in the Harvard Business Review. The world may be going global, but local is super important in business. 

2002 – Friendster launches; 2003 – MySpace arrives; 2004 – here comes Facebook; 2005 – begins the YouTube era; 2006 – Twitter is here… The evolution of social media started 13 years ago.

Fast forward to 2015, social is no longer just a hype, however using social media in business is still a huge challenge for marketers.

But things seem to be changing.

This year’s Altimeter Group Social Business benchmark research uncovered something very interesting: For the first time, an important shift in priorities is happening – strategists are moving from scaling consumer engagement in social to making a larger enterprise-wide shift and integrating social across the entire business.

Isn’t this something that social media experts have been preaching to clients for years? Back in 2013 when I was doing my research on social media for sustainability, one of the main issues was that both social media and sustainability were treated as standalone disciplines within businesses, whereas they should be fully integrated throughout organisations.

So, why should you care?