As 2014 is coming to an end, it’s time to not only reflect on what has happened over the past year, but to also have a look ahead and try to find out what the future holds.

I’m sure you’re thinking about what you would like to do, achieve and experience in 2015 and you’re setting your expectations, preparing yourself and making plans how to make that happen.

This is what companies and whole industries are now doing too. Not just because they want to identify trends and business opportunities, but also to mitigate risk and get themselves on a path to success.

As a PR student or a PR professional you need to be aware of what’s happening in your industry and what’s to come in order to acquire the knowledge and develop the right skills to excel in uni or in your job.

For students, it’s also an excellent way how to get started with a PR dissertation to give you some ideas for research topics. For professionals on the other hand, it can give you a head start and some solid ground when developing new strategies or campaigns for clients to create more opportunities for them.  

I’ve been asked many times “Why do you want to work in public relations?” To be honest with you, it’s a difficult question, partly because it is difficult to explain what PR is in the first place.

In my attempt to answer that question, I’ve written three pieces describing why I want to work in PR (if you haven’t seen them yet, you can check them out here, here and here). And I know that I recently kind of left the PR agency life by joining HubSpot, but my new role still has a lot to do with public relations. Why? Because it is based on building and maintaining mutually beneficial relationships with my clients – that is very much how the PRSA defines the essence of PR.   

So for all you out there wondering why to work in PR, I decided to start a blog series called "Why work in PR: Advice from the Pros", interviewing PR professionals about their careers, reasons why they wanted to work in PR and their PR career guidance for you.

And what better way to launch these series than with an interview with one of the most well-known names in the PR industry in the UK, who’s been teaching and guiding the new generation of PR for years – Richard Bailey.

I recently talked about why you should write a dissertation about PR. Hopefully, I’ve managed to convince you and if so I think you might find this piece quite useful as it would give you some direction how to get started with a PR dissertation – by creating a plan as a first and most important step.

Writing a dissertation is a pretty difficult task. I’ve done it twice: the first time when writing my dissertation about PR and social media, and the second time with my dissertation about social media for sustainability communications. And both of them within a year!

So as you can see, I know first-hand how much time and effort it requires if you want to do it right.

The Vital Step for PR Dissertation Success

Perhaps the most important thing I learned from my dissertation experiences is that the groundwork for an outstanding dissertation is your initial plan – that’s the backbone of your PR dissertation.

We are storytelling creatures. From the very beginning of civilisation, humans have told stories to transmit messages that needed to be remembered and retold.

The emergence of the Internet and digital technologies has brought about some significant changes to how we tell stories today. Blogging, Facebook, SEO, wearable technology are among the driving forces that have shaped the evolution of modern storytelling.

Over the centuries our need to tell stories hasn't gone away, I would say it's become bigger and bigger. What's changed though are the array of mediums we can use for our stories.

Storytelling tools and mediums

During the past ten years this array has grown massively, accounting for the most rapid evolution of storytelling in communications history and some new storytelling trends such as short videos on Vine or Snapchat stories that disappear in 24 hours. This, in turn, has had a significant impact on the PR business. As natural storytellers, PR people have had to evolve to and adapt new tools and channels to tell clients' stories and disseminate information.

Today is a big day. Today, I start a new chapter in my life as a Channel Consultant at HubSpot's EMEA headquarters in Dublin. As you can imagine, this is a big move for me not just because it's a new city (if you check out my About page, you'll see that I've moved a lot in the past years, so that wasn't really a problem), but because inbound marketing entails a much bigger responsibility spectrum than just social media and comms (the focus of my previous jobs).

And because you'll probably be seeing more and more content about inbound marketing on this blog, I thought it's important to introduce you to the concept.

Please bear in mind, I am still a 'beginner', but I hope to become a lot more proficient in the inbound marketing methodology. In fact, that's my goal. And because I am now in Boston for my two-week induction training, I'm sure I'll have a lot of things to share with you!

But first, what is inbound marketing?

As HubSpot puts it, the inbound methodology is “the best way to turn strangers into customers and promoters of your business”. It is more scalable, efficient and cost-effective than traditional outbound techniques.