I was on holidays last week and I actually managed to not open my email, read any blogs or articles or even write. I completely switched off. And I'm proud of myself for doing so for the very first time in my life.

Now I'm refreshed and ready to get back to it with full energy. And so I spent a few hours on Sunday afternoon catching up on all my reading from the past two weeks. Almost 500 articles were waiting for me in my feedly but yet again, sitting on my sofa with my coffee and reading helped me learn quite a few new things that I thought I need to share with you too.

Below you'll find 17 must-read pieces about digital, inbound marketing, public relations, agency world and management and leadership I recommend for you to go over this week.

17 Articles and Blog Post to Read Now:

Digital

#1: 26 Disruptive Tech Trends for 2016 – 2018

Brian Solis again gives us a sneak peek into the future. Brands, brace yourself and start adjusting and adapting again and never stop if you want to stay relevant!

My clients always ask me "How do you go about finding keywords and creating an effective keywords strategy?"

With the constant changes of Google's algorithm and most importantly consumer behaviour, companies struggle to define the right keywords. That struggle, though, comes from the lack of process or a way to go about coming up with the keywords. 

Today, I want to solve that challenge for you and offer you a very simple, but super effective guide to doing keywords research and defining your keywords strategy. 

But before I go on into the actual steps I want to point one significant shift that we have been seeing recently – the growing importance of topics and catering for user needs.

Today, Google wants to solve for user intent. With the huge amount of data, it now understands natural language patterns and tries to identify meaning around the context of a search. It wants to offer solutions that are meaningful and relevant, not so much purely based on the exact words a user has put in the search box. This is called semantic search and it should drive your keywords strategy. So bear this in mind as we go ahead.

How to Do Keywords Research and Create Your Keywords Strategy:

With the proliferation of digital media, influencer marketing is becoming more and more important for inbound marketing to generate traffic and help drive leads, but it’s now also more challenging to do than ever before.  

We’ve spoken a little bit about influencer marketing when discussing it as part of the PESO (Paid, Earned, Shared, Owned media) model that guides modern PR and even more so inbound PR that is strongly orientated towards digital and inbound.

Basically, influencer marketing is getting others to tell your story, and not just any others, but people who have somewhat of a celebrity status within their area of expertise and have a fairly big audience due to their popularity and reputation. When we say celebrity, that doesn’t necessary mean an actress or a singer. It could, for example, be a fitness blogger with a huge Instagram following.

The problem with influencer marketing, though, is that it’s hard, you cannot control the results, and with the rise of other influencers such as YouTubers or Instagrammers and no longer just journalists or bloggers, the sheer of influencers has made it even more complicated to pick the right ones. 

And there’s, of course, the notion of not knowing how to approach those influencers as it is still rather new and very different than traditional media relations. Influencer relations is the Wild West now.

On Thursday evening, I had the pleasure of meeting Stephen Waddington. It was an inspiring dinner of intellectual curiosity and thought-proving stories and conversatios. I think we both learnt a lot from each other.

Of course, we spent most of the evening talking about the PR industry and our experiences over the years and I kind of got to pitch my concept of Inbound PR and how the inbound methodology is the perfect fit for PR.

There are two main reasons, I said, why inbound is the perfect fit for PR:

1. PR people are natural content creators and storytellers.
2. PR people suck at measurement.

If you are familiar with the inbound marketing methodology, you will see that content is at the centre of inbound (refer to this page to learn more about it). And content is something that PR people do better than anyone in the creative industry – marketers, advertisers or digital experts.

However, the single biggest challenge that PR pros have been facing since forever is measurement. Just google PR measurement and you’ll see tons of articles explaining how AVEs don’t work, we need a new set of tools, how PR hasn’t adjusted to the new era of digital and metrics etc. (See here, here and here for example.)

Inbound makes measurement possible. Inbound also doesn’t work without content.

But there’s even more.

After being away for two weeks – first at INBOUND15 in Boston, then at dmexco in Cologne – I had so many things  to take care of so I used my weekend to deal with some urgent emails and to catch up with my reading: there were about 350 unread articles among the 40 subscriptions that I have in my feedly.

I’ve managed to get down to 88 articles now, so this was a productive learning weekend.

Anyway, there were so many good articles which I thought would be useful for the other Channel Consultants in my team at HubSpot so I emailed them a list of 10 fantastic reading recommendations.

Then I thought, these articles would surely be of interest to my readers too and so I decided to share them with you as well. I hope you enjoy them and they inspire a powerful start to your working/study week.

10 Reading Recommendations to Power up Your Week:

#1: The Most Common Mistakes Companies Make with Global Marketing

This is some fantastic advice from our very own Nataly Kelly – our VP of Marketing Localisation at HubSpot – in the Harvard Business Review. The world may be going global, but local is super important in business.