I consider myself very lucky to have some super intelligent and talented friends. 

Kareem and his brother Aamen are among them. Kareem worked with me at HubSpot and Aamen was at Google. After gathering some great experience at those software companies they both set out to start their own business around content and are doing a terrific job at it. 

I was honoured when they invited me to participate in their sparerooms talk show. 

We chatted about:

• public relations,
• my Inbound PR book and how small business and entrepreneurs can take on some of the tips,
• the writing and publishing processes while working full-time and how others can do it too,
• building a personal brand online and offline, 
• and building a partner program for smaller companies.

Check out the video for the full conversation, there are some fun moments as well!

Digital is an enterprise-wide strategic priority that cannot be isolated to just the marketing or IT department. Everybody in the organisation has a role to play. 

I've just finished reading the 2018-2019 State of Digital Transformation report which clearly illustrates how disruptive technologies continue to impact organisations and markets and how digital transformation as responsibility is moving beyond IT and is maturing into an enterprise-wide movement but there's still a lot of work to be done. 

As the report describes, digital transformation means modernising how companies work and compete and helping them effectively adapt and grow in an evolving digital economy where customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX) and organisational culture are the clear drivers that empower and accelerate change, growth, and innovation.

Let's take a look at some of the key findings that stood out to me while reading the report.

The Top 4 Learnings about the State of Digital Transformation

Updated as of 3 March 2019.

Last week, I spoke in front of 300 people about Inbound PR at the London HUG organised by one of our HubSpot partners Whitehat SEO. 

It was a terrific event with a terrific audience. 

A lot of people were tweeting and as I was looking at the #InboundPR hashtag on Twitter to create a moment of the event, I noticed a bunch of other posts about Inbound PR so I decided to create a collection of the top blog posts I saw covering the topic. 

I'm very grateful to all agencies and PR pros exploring the Inbound PR model, testing it and adopting it in their practices. 

Here's what some of them have published. 

Top 21 Collection of Inbound PR Posts

This is a guest post by Iva Grigorova.

The role of influencers has become key in brand communication.

Social media opened the world of communication because it connects people. Digital media giants like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube have been transforming the communication industry for years.

People spend most of their time online where they consume content.

Zenith’s Global Intelligence report for Q3 2018 says Facebook has 15.5 billion users per day with global reach 53.6%; Google and YouTube mobile search has 75.6% global reach; and, Twitter has 335 million monthly users and +11% grow of daily users, meaning existing users have become more active.

In addition to the growth of social media, let's take a look at the six key reasons why you need influencers to help you grow your business: 

I cover Edelman's Trust Barometer every year. 

This year's results came out last week and they did surprise me. Positively.

Trust has changed profoundly in the past year. People have been losing faith in traditional authority figures and institutions to help them navigate a turbulent world and more recently, they are losing confidence in the social platforms that fostered peer-to-peer trust because of fake news or false information being used as a weapon. 

We have shifted our trust to the relationships within our control and most notably our employers. 

People are now bringing their call for change to the workplace where they have a trusted relationship.

Employees are ready and willing to trust their employers, but the trust must be earned through more than “business as usual" and not simply operational excellence or decisions that would impact jobs. An organisation’s contributions to society, its values and its vision for the future all outweigh operational decisions in terms of earning trust.