Digital and social media has been a main area of interest for a number of industries, but it is PR that has been transformed to an unrecognisable state thanks to these new developments. For over a decade now PR professionals have experienced firsthand how social media has affected the practice, but it seems they still haven’t got to grips with it. PR specialists seem to still struggle with this new communications channel.

I didn’t make this conclusion on my own just like that; it was something I discovered while doing proper primary and secondary research for my dissertation about social media’s impact on the PR industry. And as it turns out, a brand new research confirms this lack of digital skills among comms specialists.

LinkedIn is the largest professional social media network in the world and has been steadily growing in numbers and importance for businesses and individuals in the past years. The platform plays an influential role both for personal as well as for professional reasons, from an individual and from a company perspective. If you haven’t yet made use of the possibilities that LinkedIn offers and utilised its power, I encourage you to do so now!

To persuade you why you (and your business or company you work for) have to be on LinkedIn I’ve created a detailed infographic that shows quite a few relevant facts and figures about the platform and how members make use of it.

I’ve always been fascinated with infographics and this is the second one I created myself (the first one represented my dissertation findings; you can check it out here). I hope you find it useful. I would love to hear your comments :)

As someone who has become naturally drawn to anything about social media and PR and is super interested in the impacts of social media on communications (I wrote my dissertation on the subject!), I was thrilled when I saw an infographic called ‘PR Then and Now’ the other day.

The infographic illustrates how barely recognisable today’s PR industry is in comparison to just a decade ago. Technology seems to have played a significant role into this development. We no longer use fax machines, we use e-mails; we don’t wait for user’s feedback anymore, it comes directly to us all the time via social media. Do you see? Technology is in all of this.

Which makes me wonder: has technology changed the practice into a more positive direction or the contrary? Because as you can see, it is gadgets like laptops and smartphones and channels like social media that have pushed society (and PRs) towards a new type of communications – a mobile one, an always-on one. What happened to face-to-face communication? Of course, such interactions are still crucial, but we must admit their frequency has decreased massively. Is that good or bad?

Tough question, I know... And there’s no easy or straightforward answer.

Just yesterday Pinterest officially launched its web-based analytics tool! This is truly great news! It was about time we get such figures coming directly from Pinterest itself, instead of having to rely on other third-party tools. The Pinterest analytics platform is absolutely free and allows site owners to track the engagement of their website visitors on the social network.

Such data can be extremely valuable especially for business accounts (which were launched a few months back) because it will help identify how exactly people interact with the content originating from their websites.

Here’s what the new analytics can tell you:

• how many pins have been pinned and repinned from your site
• how many people have pinned and repinned from your site
• how many times your pins have appeared in the main feed, in search results or on boards
• how many people have seen these pins
• how many impressions the content has generated
• how many people have visited your site from Pinterest
• a selection of your most recent, most repinned and most clicked pins

You can set a custom date range so that you can see how your activities have changed over time. You can also download the data allowing you to easily present the numbers offline.

Today I want to show you a campaign, which has delivered its message in such a powerful, yet simple way and has so managed to make people think again and take the necessary actions to change their lives. This was an ad created by Ogilvy for the Thai Health Promotion Foundation aiming at reminding people of how bad smoking is and encouraging them to make the healthier choice.

I am not going to describe and retell this brilliant idea because I just can’t! I can’t explain what an impact it has with words, you have to see the video yourself. It is truly powerful!

I would love to hear your thoughts and what you felt after seeing it.