There's no doubt that organisational culture impacts the behaviour, values and practices of anybody working at that organisation. 

As a program manager, I've always thought of myself as a different type of leader who acts as a change agent to help create a positive organisational culture among my project or program team.  

But since I've always worked in an international environment and with multi-cultural teams, that's not always been easy. 

I've written about cultural differences before and they play a huge role in the success of any project or program. 

In fact, knowledge and awareness of cultural values can enable leaders and managers to effectively manage and work through intercultural conflict and interactions.

To learn more, I found a research a while ago performed by GLOBE that maps leadership within cultural groups around the world. 

The GLOBE research team defines leadership as the "ability of an individual to influence, motivate, and enable others to contribute toward the effectiveness and success of the organisations of which they are members."

The team found that members of different societies have differing expectations from their leaders that are influenced by their cultural values. They also identified leadership attributes that were culturally-endorsed.

Every forward-thinking PR or marketing professional will tell you that top-down, “push” messages no longer work.

We live in a world that’s gone inbound. A world where to be successful with your communication you need to rely on methods that pull people into your brand rather than interrupt them with irrelevant content.

This is exactly what Inbound PR is all about – it’s a whole new philosophy on how to do PR in the modern, digital world.

Its methodology focuses on two key areas – content and measurement.

Remarkable content created and shared on the right mediums is the most successful way to reach your audience, or as we normally say in inbound – your personas.

Measurement then is essential to 1) gauge the success of your campaigns and 2) improve as you go.

All of this sounds very logical and kind of simple but its actual execution is what most companies and professionals have major difficulties with.

Through my work as a PR professional and an agency business consultant, I’ve found that most businesses struggle to transform towards Inbound PR because of fear.

I think I've spent the majority of my career working in Customer Success (or Customer Experience if you prefer). 

Even my days as an Account Manager at the PR agencies I worked at count as Customer Success because my goal was to ensure the client was happy and was achieving their goals. 

But if we look at the business world, very few companies are truly customer-first. 

The sales department and the sales quotas rule the world as that's how most businesses make money. 

And so many companies have never truly focused on putting the customer first, meaning completely shifting their business models. 

Doing this is actually quite simple, yet complicated within an entire organisation that's used to working another way. 

And if you don't believe me, go no further but to read Feargal Quinn's quick book called 'Crowning the Customer'. 

I read it on the plane to Lisbon a couple of weeks ago and I loved it. 

It was written in a simple to follow language, with plenty of examples (granted, many for the retail business but that make sense for any industry) and perfectly logical advice.

I've been doing some work on influencer marketing recently and specifically on why use it, best practices, examples etc.

I'm not going to go in the discussion around whether influencer marketing is the same thing as PR or not, whether it should be PR doing it or the marketing department. 

I'll just say that when I was working in a PR agency back 6-7 years ago, I was engaging a group of young beauty bloggers in a very similar fashion as influencer marketing preaches. 

Anyway, back to my research.  I've published a list of influencer marketing statistics before but I figured it's time to update that and share a new list that's more recent. 

So when I came across an infographic from smallbizgenius I knew I had found what I needed. 

It's a long and detailed infographic with more than 80 influencer marketing statistics. 

You can check out the infographic below but first, here are the stats that got my attention:

10 Top Influencer Marketing Stats:

This is a guest post by my friend Kareem Mostafa from tribetactics and author of Original Series: How to create binge-worthy, B2B content that drives revenue.

It's not really rocket science what we content marketers wake up and try to do every day: get attention.

We seek to build attention by creating content. Many of us believe that the goal is to create content that is merely better (whatever that means) than others in the same industry in order to stand out - believing that our buyers are perfectly rational human beings. 

Spoiler alert, they're not. They're emotional beings who watch YouTube, Netflix, and listen to Spotify and iTunes as much as you do.

We're not competing for attention from others in our industry. The world is not that clear-cut and perfect. We're competing for attention with virtually everything in our buyer's world. We're competing for attention with Netflix. 

Exactly what is our plan to do that? 

One thought that comes to mind is that Netflix create their own original series on a regular basis. Somewhere along the way, a (very) small group of marketing pioneers began getting the trick - and started creating their own brand original series as well. Wistia, Mailchimp, Ernest Packaging, HubSpot, to name a few. 

And you can do it too. Here's why you need to consider it.

5 Reasons Why You Need Original Series in Your Content Marketing