Inbound PR will be two years old next month.

When I started working on the concept, I didn't think I'd get it as far as featuring it in a book chapter for #FuturePRoof or introducing it at INBOUND16 – the largest inbound conference in the world with over 19,000 attendees.

But the number of mentions, tweets, shares and comments about the concept over the past months really lead me to believe that there is a need for it. 

Inbound PR focuses on what PR does best – content – and turns it into a powerful machine that drives true bottom line results that can be measured. By doing so, Inbound PR alleviates PR's biggest challenge – measurement. 

It's a simple concept and a methodology but in its very essence, Inbound PR is a mindset change. It requires PR people to change the way they think about the work that they do, the value that they provide and how they actually do it. It requires a lot of learning and eye-opening understanding of the wider business, marketing and sales disciplines.  Otherwise, it won't be fit for the future. 

This aim of this blog is exactly that – to facilitate learning and drive change.

With the global adoption of digital, a lot has been said about the PR industry. Unfortunately, not always positive.

Take, for example, keeping up with social media and online channels to develop appropriate skills and offer the type of services that clients nowadays need has been a painful challenge. Not to mention then measurement which has been PR's biggest problem since its very existence.  

So how does PR stay relevant? 

To figure this out, we need to first analyse our current reality. 

When we think about the past two decades, there are two key things brands and their PR people need to consider:

• Our consumer and purchasing behaviours have changed, massively.
• If you don’t have an online presence, you don’t exist.

Let’s start with the first one.

When I started working on the Inbound PR concept, my initial thought was that PR pros are really great at content creation and storytelling but they were pretty bad at measurement. I remember that from my days working in the industry.

On the other hand, inbound marketing people are well versed in data and numbers - this is what I saw from working with hundreds of agencies as a consultant at HubSpot. 

Then I decided to dig into the two disciplines. 

What's Public Relations? 

As per definition, public relations is the strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between an organisation and its publics. This comes from the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) which is the leading PR organisation in the world.

The Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) in the UK – the other leading PR body – argues that:

"Public relations is about reputation - the result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you. Public relations is the discipline which looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics."

As you can see from the definitions, PR is all about reputation and engaging in meaningful relationships with various publics.

Last week was one of the best weeks of my life. 

A huge part in that played my talk at the biggest inbound conference in the world with 19,000 marketing, communications and sales professionals: INBOUND in Boston. 

I spoke about my concept Inbound PR that I developed last year and I've been working on since. 

Heading up the stage in front of a fully packed room with 300 people coming from a PR or a marketing background was extremely gratifying and exciting.  

The best part was the feedback afterward with a lot of people coming over to me right at the end of the talk to chat or ask questions or later connecting on LinkedIn and requesting meetings. 

There were also a lot of people positively tweeting during or after. Here's my favourite: 

The Inbound PR session by @IliyanaStareva is the sleeper hit of #INBOUND16. @HubSpot: heads up. Iliyana's framework is going to be BIG.

— Jonathan Michael (@JonathanMichael) November 10, 2016

For me, all that interest and social sharing are the ultimate confirmation that the concept is needed. 

I'm hoping by now you've become curious about the talk and if you weren't there, don't worry! I've got the slides right here for you to take a look.  

We've known PR to be slow at adopting new trends and technologies. 

There's a lot of talking being done around how PR needs to evolve and reinvent itself because if it doesn't, PR people will die out like dinosaurs. 

That's a scary thought. But valid when we think about PR's traditional focus on outputs rather than the actual value they provide to clients. 

This is especially visible today when digital rules our lives and allows PR people to measure the results of their activities and if done right, to tie them back to actual money through influenced sales numbers.

That's easier said than done, though, because the reality is, very few PR agencies are able to do so today.

There seems to be a disconnect between what PR agencies can do for their clients and what they actually end up offering them.

That's my main learning from the latest PRCA Digital PR and Communications Report 2016.   

The research looks into how PR uses digital communications across industries as well as among in-house PR people and PR agencies. 

Today I'm going to cover some of the results from the point of view of PR agencies and that of clients.