If you’ve been following my blog, I’m sure you already know about my love for research. I’ve shared multiple research findings in the fields of social media and PR and I’ve also conducted some serious examinations in the areas myself, including my two BA dissertations, the first one about social media’s impact on PR and the second one about social media communications for sustainability.

So, staying true to my passion for data and research, today I want to show you some interesting findings about the current state of the social networks landscape and specifically about Instagram – a platform I’ve been using just for a while, but I already love.

In case you are not that familiar with Instagram, it’s a mobile social media network based entirely on visuals. So, basically you take a shot on your smartphone and you can publish it on Instagram in a square format, adding some cool image editing effects, if you want to. At the beginning, Instagram was only available on mobiles, but there’s now a website version too. You can check out my profile here to get an overview.

Instagram’s popularity has grown extremely quickly. The platform currently has over

This is not a regular blog post that you are about to read. With the following I want to share with you one of the proudest moments and biggest achievements of my life that just confirms my passion for social media and PR and my drive and motivation to have a stellar career in the industry.

What am I talking about? Well, I am mentioned as a student pioneer in building a personal brand online in one of the most awaited books of the year on social media and PR.

The book in question is the follow-up of the best-selling Share This, published by The Chartered Institute for Public Relations – the UK’s professional body for PR practitioners. The sequel, Share This Too, is a practical book, written by 24 public relations professionals to address the use of social media for PR and offer guidelines for various areas such as online media relations, measuring and monitoring etc., which practitioners can apply in their work. The foreword of the book was written by Brian Solis – a pioneer in the field (whom I am a big fan of), which only shows how important this book for the industry is. Furthermore, the book is already a best seller being the number 1 in Amazon Hot New Releases as well as among the top 20 PR books. It is also attracting a lot of online buzz.

I am proud to be part of one of the book chapters,

Over the last few years two relatively new business philosophies have become the trendy buzzwords in the corporate space – social media and sustainability. The rise of social media has provoked a complex cultural and communications shift in the way people share information and participate in conversations, resulting in the empowerment of the individual to demand change as well as to expect responsibility and social consciousness from brands to strike the triple bottom line balance.

This new social economy is based on engagement, relationships and mutual trust where relevance to the individual is a main currency for meaningful communications. Thus, innovation has become crucial for companies to reach, educate and inspire this new consumer about sustainability, but there is still both a need and a demand to raise sustainability awareness, break down silos and improve communications practices and knowledge management.

To analyse and explain social media’s impact on sustainability communications and offer practical guidance for companies interested in exploring these new opportunities I chose to examine the power of social media as a communications channel for creating business sustainability value for my second BA dissertation.

The main research objective was to discover whether social media can be a support tool or a menace for corporate sustainability.

I examined the importance and the current state of social media for sustainability communications and the opportunities and the risks of social media comms for creating business sustainability value.

As a result, I developed a best practice guide for utilising the power of social media and avoiding potential pitfalls, which you can see in the infographic at the end of this post.

Lately I’ve come across quite a few clever and interactive campaigns. The one that I am going to show you today is yet another example of how brands are increasingly trying to engage their audiences not only in the communications process, but also to involve them in other business operations - remember Nordstrom’s merchandising strategy to drive sales through showcasing the most popular Pinterest items in their physical stores and so to bring the online experience offline? In terms of engaging the online community Tesco have recently done something similar. However, this time it touches on another popular subject - not fashion, but alcohol.

The UK supermarket chain is going to launch in October the so called social wine that was created and designed entirely by the supermarket’s social media community. As Ad Age notes, wine’s reputation as a social drink has been taken literally by Tesco.

What I particularly like about Tesco’s project

A while ago I blogged about how we, women, have a long way to go before reaching the top of the career ladder to the same extent as men. That blog post was inspired by a talk Sheryl Sandberg gave at TED (if you haven’t seen it yet, please do it now!), which really moved me and I immediately purchased Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead on my Kindle. Now that I have read it I want to show you what I found most interesting.

Let’s give you some facts first as presented in the book:

• Only 17 of the 195 independent countries in the world are led by women.
• Women hold only 20% of seats in parliaments globally.
• A meager 4% of the Fortune 500 CEOs are women.
• In the US women hold ca. 14% of executive officer positions and 17% of board seats; in the UK – 7% of executive directorships and 15% of board seats among the FTSE 100 companies, but only 5% of executive directorships and 9% of board seats among the FTSE 250.
• In the UK women working full-time are still paid an average 15% less per hour than men.
• According to a 2011 McKinsey report men are promoted based on potential, while women are promoted based on past accomplishments.