I consider myself very lucky to have some super intelligent and talented friends. 

Kareem and his brother Aamen are among them. Kareem worked with me at HubSpot and Aamen was at Google. After gathering some great experience at those software companies they both set out to start their own business around content and are doing a terrific job at it. 

I was honoured when they invited me to participate in their sparerooms talk show. 

We chatted about:

• public relations,
• my Inbound PR book and how small business and entrepreneurs can take on some of the tips,
• the writing and publishing processes while working full-time and how others can do it too,
• building a personal brand online and offline, 
• and building a partner program for smaller companies.

Check out the video for the full conversation, there are some fun moments as well!

Digital is an enterprise-wide strategic priority that cannot be isolated to just the marketing or IT department. Everybody in the organisation has a role to play. 

I've just finished reading the 2018-2019 State of Digital Transformation report which clearly illustrates how disruptive technologies continue to impact organisations and markets and how digital transformation as responsibility is moving beyond IT and is maturing into an enterprise-wide movement but there's still a lot of work to be done. 

As the report describes, digital transformation means modernising how companies work and compete and helping them effectively adapt and grow in an evolving digital economy where customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX) and organisational culture are the clear drivers that empower and accelerate change, growth, and innovation.

Let's take a look at some of the key findings that stood out to me while reading the report.

The Top 4 Learnings about the State of Digital Transformation

I cover Edelman's Trust Barometer every year. 

This year's results came out last week and they did surprise me. Positively.

Trust has changed profoundly in the past year. People have been losing faith in traditional authority figures and institutions to help them navigate a turbulent world and more recently, they are losing confidence in the social platforms that fostered peer-to-peer trust because of fake news or false information being used as a weapon. 

We have shifted our trust to the relationships within our control and most notably our employers. 

People are now bringing their call for change to the workplace where they have a trusted relationship.

Employees are ready and willing to trust their employers, but the trust must be earned through more than “business as usual" and not simply operational excellence or decisions that would impact jobs. An organisation’s contributions to society, its values and its vision for the future all outweigh operational decisions in terms of earning trust.

Did you know that by 2020, IoT technology will be in 95% of new electronics?

That's just a year away, yes.

We thought that online and social channels were disruptive but how about innovations such as 3D printing, electric cars, the internet of things (IoT), virtual reality and artificial intelligence (AI)?

These new technologies are completely reinventing how we do pretty much everything in our personal and professional lives. 

And we will all require new skills to be able to do our jobs. In fact, in their research, Accenture Interactive predicts that more than half of the workforce will have to learn new skills within the next five years due to human-machine collaboration.

No wonder then that one-third of companies are planning to increase their innovation-related investments by more than 50% as worldwide spending on technology and services to enable digital transformation (DX) is going to reach nearly $2 trillion by 2022.

But what are some of those investments going to be? 

I often get asked two questions: 

• How did you manage to build your own brand? 
• What makes companies stand out in a blue ocean? 

To both of these questions, the answer in its simplest form is value. 

I began blogging in 2012 while I was still a student with a couple of important goals in mind: learn how to write better as I wanted to pursue a career in PR but was studying International Business, and share all the knowledge I was gathering with the world so that I can help others and by doing so, build an audience. 

Over time, I developed a pretty good readership, expanded my social networks, made tremendous connections and eventually became recognised as the person who invented Inbound PR that led to a book and a ton of speaking engagements. 

I did this by recognising the unique value I could provide to the market that was somehow not there - contributing my inbound marketing knowledge to the public relations practice. 

As for companies, I spent years in consulting