Last week, the CIPR published the results of its annual State of the PR Profession survey. I must admit, the results are frankly sad: from a clear inequality pay gap of £8,483 in favour of men that is purely based on gender, not service, seniority, parenthood, or a higher prevalence of part-time work amongst women, to 51% of senior managers in PR saying that they are "extremely stressed" or "very stressed" in their roles.

Steven Waddington wrote a terrific post about these and the other eight “area of pain in public relations”. I encourage you to read it, however what I want to focus on today are the findings and key learnings PR students should take into consideration to help them prepare for their next journey – getting their first PR job after graduation and excelling as a PR professional.

I would imagine that reading through the survey results, you are probably asking yourself: Why do I even want to work in PR?

And rightly so… Yes, the industry is indeed facing some serious issues. Yes, it may not be easy to solve them. And yes, you’ve chosen a challenging career, but you have a role to play too, because you the ones who will be shaping the future of the industry. Isn’t making an impact better than just having a job?

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to participate in a Q&A session for a social media strategy workshop that was held by a friend of mine – Chryssa Skodra – for a group of start-ups in Finland. I really enjoyed being part of it via Google Hangout as I got to interact with some bright entrepreneurs and share my knowledge around social media and blogging.

My friend Chryssa, who follows the HubSpot blog and knows that we post a ton of useful content there, also asked me to send over a list of curated articles on social media strategy to share with the participants. I happily obliged, of course, and thought that this list of resources would be super useful for you too, so I decided to share it with you today.

Please note, this a strategy guide, not an implementation guide – how you create and optimise your social media profiles or what social media posts to create are topics for another piece. This one is about understanding what social media is, how it can benefit your business and what you need to consider to get started. 

One of the secrets of writing an excellent PR dissertation is choosing the right topic. And by right topic I mean the subject of your research that is not only time and industry relevant and so value-adding, but also one that you’re passionate about.

Over the last few years, quite a few students have contacted me, asking to give them some advice and guidance around ideas for public relations dissertation topics. And so to help you even more, I decided that in my role as your PR dissertation mentor, I should share some hot topics and potential PR dissertation research subjects to offer you some inspiration when you are planning your dissertation and pondering what the write about.

These are simply rough ideas that can serve you as guidance for your PR dissertation, but if you do decide to write about one of those topics, it’s important that you carefully research the opportunities behind it and ensure that you would actually enjoy writing about it. Because if you are not passionate or at least interested in this topic, you would be much less motivated to do the work. After all, a PR dissertation is a lot of work and time, so you better choose a topic that you are going to enjoy spending the next few months on.  

Storytelling – undeniably the buzzword of 2014 in communications and marketing continues to garner the attention of many professionals and businesses. It’s kind of become a more trendy word for content creation, don’t you think?

With the significant shifts happening in the media space where news finds us rather than us looking for it, storytelling is moving to a whole new level with social and mobile dictating the creation and dissemination of news, and so the journalistic craft as well.

This is one of the major findings of a recent study by Edelman, News Whip and Muck Rack addressing social news consumption. Indeed, the research focused on the US, but reading through the results I believe there are some important points to bear in mind outside the US. Why? Because they could be sources of competitive advantage for early adopters around Europe (I think we all know (but not always admit) that most European countries move a little bit slower than the US when it comes to the adoption of technological advancements). 

Two weeks ago something amazing happened. Joyce Sullivan – a passionate social media professional and professor from New York – discovered my work and made me part of her social media talk during an All Women in Media NYC meeting at the AOL HQ in New York.

A day before the event, Joyce was looking for an infographic for her talk to show the attendees what's happening in public relations and social media.

When she googled “social media in public relations” my infographic about the results from my first dissertation on social media’s impact on PR that I had posted on visual.ly came up. (How amazing is that – to rank so high in SERP!)

After she discovered my infographic, she tweeted me and we started a conversation, which we eventually moved from Twitter to email and we even connected all over the internet – LinkedIn, Instagram, SlideShare etc.