Over the past few weeks I’ve seen quite a few reviews of 2013 and pieces making predictions and sharing tips for 2014. For once I've decided to follow the crowd and share my point of view and my 2014 advice regarding the PR profession. How is this post different from the others? Well, the list of 9 traits of the future PR pro is based on my personal observations and experiences, but was also inspired by some interesting research findings (you know me, I love research!) and by the pieces of two PR professionals I highly respect.

Getting straight to the point, according to a new research by the European Communication Professional Skills and Innovation Programme (ECOPSI) the PR profession has a long way to go until it matures.

The ECOPSI is a European funded project that maps and evaluates the current and future competences of communications practitioners across Europe. The overall finding when it comes to the skills and competences of communications professionals is that PR is indeed a maturing discipline, but there are on-going gaps and deficiencies in the professional advancement of individuals. Formal qualification and life-long learning are the key aspects here – basically the need for further knowledge acquisition and skills development.

It only took a decade for new technology to completely disrupt businesses, markets and entire industries. With the emergence of social media organisations had to adapt to a much faster rate of continuous change in how society interacts, communicates, receives and finds information. Furthermore, the rapid embracement of smartphones and tablets with internet access anytime, anywhere has brought another challenge for brands as they are now required to act 24/7. Social, digital and mobile have changed our personal and professional lives to a massive extent. It’s an exciting era, isn’t it? According to a new report by We Are Social the near future is going to be even more so.

Just last week, agency We Are Social published their Global Digital Statistics for 2014. It’s an interesting read and I thought you’d find it useful too (whether out of curiosity or to help you plan your social media activities for the year), so I decided to share some of the report’s highlights.

The 180+ pages report is especially valuable for global campaigns as it covers key statistics, data and behavioural indicators for every country on Earth and presents in-depth analysis for 24 of the world's largest economies, including for example Germany, the UK, the USA, Australia, Brazil and China.

Have you ever written a blog post? If you have, you probably know that writing blog posts that not only grab, but also keep the reader’s attention is not always as easy as it may seem.

Good bloggers know what their audience likes, have great ideas how to engage it and are experts in their fields. Most importantly though, they know how to talk to that audience and how to best put their thoughts and knowledge on ‘paper’. And believe me, that’s a real challenge! This blog post will offer you some useful advice and tips to overcome it.

So, what are the ingredients of a successful blog post?

According to a brilliant infographic by WhoIsHostingThis.com that you can see below, to create a killer blog post you need a great title that grabs the reader’s attention, a catching first sentence that generates interest, and a story that keeps that attention.

Writing killer headlines

Creating a good headline is pretty much an art. And this is a skill any blogger or writer must excel at, because no matter how great the actual post it, if the headline sucks, no one will read the rest. A great headline should be clear, short and up to the point, giving a hint about the story afterwards.

5 tips and ideas:

With the advent of the New Year it’s time to have a look back at what’s happened and what we’ve learned during the previous year. I started this blog two years ago and it’s important for me to reflect on its performance in 2013 and make a comparison with 2012. Only so will I be able to see what’s worked and what hasn’t, what you’ve liked and read the most and so this will allow me to focus exactly on that content that you, my readers, are most interested in.

2013 was the year of many firsts in my life – many of those events I’ve shared with you here:

• I graduated with a Double Degree Bachelor in International Business, having submitted my second dissertation about social media for sustainability communications.
• I started my first full-time job as a Social Media Account Manager at Brandzeichen – a Communications Consultancy in Düsseldorf, part of the Ketchum network.
• I published my first book, and then my second too, only at the age of 23.
• I was mentioned in the bestselling PR and social media book Share This Too as the only woman among the five students listed as early social media adopters and pioneers in “making a name for themselves and kick-starting their careers through blogging and other forms of media.”
• I created yet another infographic, and then another one, which I am very proud of as I have so managed to improve my skills in developing visual content.
• I had the first contributed post published on my blog after my Google Page Rank jumped up significantly – this is, I think, the first step towards monetising the blog.

At the end of my first year of blogging

Over the past few decades our world has faced some remarkable changes due to the rapid development of new technology and the Internet. However, a few years back, a new era began, an era where ordinary people have a 'say' on every possible matter, anytime, anywhere - the emergence of social media has altered our lives enormously by giving everyone the opportunity to be a publisher and a communicator. This, in turn, has had a huge impact on the Public Relations practice, which has always been concerned with communicating and building relationships with various publics.

How and why social media affected the PR industry is the topic of my second book “Social Media and the Rebirth of PR: The Emergence of Social Media as a Change Driver for PR”, published by Anchor Academic Publishing.

The book covers the fundamentals and the development of PR and social media over the years, thereby emphasising the differences between PR now and PR before the emergence of social media. It not only describes how exactly social media altered the PR industry as a whole, but also how communications professionals are practicing PR using social media in their work and private lives as well.