Thanks to the new media landscape forged by the Internet and social media a new era of two-way street conversations began. Everyone can now publish content and stories and reach a global audience in real time. This empowerment of individuals to have their demands heard has led to a fundamental shift in how brands are expected to behave and communicate.

More so than ever, businesses need to be innovative and clever with their communications approaches in order to really reach and deeply engage their audiences, because as Gary Vaynerchuk explains in his 99u keynote talk below, it's a noisy, fast-paced world out there.

Even a robot print newspaper that is generated almost entirely by algorithms based on social-sharing activity and other user behaviour by the paper’s readers is coming to market.

So, if this is the future of the media and considering that PR has always been about influencing organisational audiences and particularly the media, how can then PR influence robots?

Well, it can't.

But it can influence that social-sharing activity and behaviour of readers.

How?

By harnessing the power of storytelling.

Vaynerchuk says that the one thing that binds us together, regardless of our professions and backgrounds, are the stories we tell. That is never going to change because great storytelling is the way we make real money, real impact and real change. And there's a very simple reasoning behind this: we are all human beings.

What I found pretty funny is that according to Vaynerchuk the majority of organisations and professionals "are storytelling like it's 2007 in a 2014 world".

Did you know that Generation Y will soon be the greatest combined purchasing power in history? By 2025 millennials will comprise 75% of the global workforce. That’s quite the fact to grasp especially for older generations, who according to a recent survey by Deloitte might have a problem understanding and embracing the requirements, needs and wishes of millennials.

Before I move on to the rather interesting research findings, I just want to make clear who the millennials (or Generation Y) are – basically, anyone born from the early 1980s to the early 2000s falls into that category, including me too. Baby boomers or Generation X, on the other hand, are the ones born between the early 1960s to the early 1980s and Generation Z or digital natives are those born from the mid 1990s to the present day. The other generations are listed on Wikipedia here.

So what did Deloitte find?

The overall conclusion of the survey results is that Generation Y has big demands and high expectation from businesses, governments and the future workplace. This means that, as Deloitte puts it, business leaders are facing significant challenges “if they are to meet the expectations of the Millennial generation.”

On the scale of one to ten, with ten meaning "extremely" and one meaning "not at all", how successful would you say you are? How accomplished do you feel? How satisfied are you with your career and professional life? I hope your answers lie somewhere close to ten. Now, let me ask you some more questions: How stressed would you say you are? How satisfied are you with your relationships and personal life? How happy are you?

If you gave all those questions an answer close to ten, congratulations! You are one of the very few lucky people in this world who's got it all!

Now, let's talk about the rest of us - the ones who still feel there's something missing, there's something to improve, there's something more to do and work on so that we feel truly accomplished and happy at the same time.

That journey towards true happiness in our personal as well as our professional lives starts with our definition of success, or the way society as a whole pictures what success should look like. And for the past decades that picture has unfortunately been rather distorted.

This is one of the messages of Arianna Huffington's, founder and president of the Huffington Post and best-selling author, new book "Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder".

Having been deeply inspired by Arianna's commencement speech at Smith College, I was eager to start reading the book the minute my pre-order was delivered on my Kindle. And I loved it.

The way the book

If you follow my blog, you know how passionate I am about the issue of gender inequality in the workforce. You’ve also seen my commitment to join and support well-known female leaders such as Sheryl Sandberg and Barri Rafferty by fostering the conversation about women climbing the career ladder. And that is the aim of this post – to speak up yet again and offer you some interesting facts and figures.

My posts on the topic have so far been rather negative – highlighting how much more there is that we need to do in order to ensure real gender equality at the workplace. With this piece, I am going to focus more on the bright side and show you some facts and figures about the progress women have made over the past centuries.

Below you’ll find a very informative infographic that presents a rather optimistic view for the future with millennial women leading the change.

The infographic offers an interesting comparison of how things are now for women and how they used to in terms of titles held, advancement opportunities, aspirations and how having kids factors female careers.

Here are some highlights:

What does sustainability mean to business? Is it about reducing environmental impact? Or maybe about improving reputation through CSR activities? Is it worth it? How can we translate this sustainable business vision into actual business operations? How can we align commercial performance to sustainability for the long run? Those are questions that many leaders and company executives ask themselves when being faced with the challenge of adopting sustainability in their organisations.

The truth is, if truly embedded into every part of the business, sustainability can offer tremendous competitive advantages.

This is not something I just made up. Many studies and even my own research have shown that embracing sustainability and effectively managing the triple bottom line can be a key driver for innovation, growth and progress.

A recent survey by BSI and Verdantix confirms that yet again.

150 sustainability executives from 20 industry sectors, including retail and consumer products, consumer services, manufacturing, business and financial services, oil and gas, utilities and mining were part of the research, depicting a fairly sound representation of organisational leadership.

The overall finding was that the majority of business executives (70%) identify sustainability as key growth driver, however, connecting sustainability to overall financial and business performance still remains a challenge with only 51% believing that sustainability issues will impact their firm’s financial performance over the next two years.