It's been a little over a year since I started writing about Inbound PR and introduced the concept. 

Now that the idea has spread and seems to be gaining popularity, it's time to put a framework around it. 

Today, I want to introduce you to the Inbound PR Methodology that visualises how Inbound PR relates to inbound marketing and how it differs from it. It captures how Inbound PR is all about targeted and relevant content being measured throughout the way to make smart and purposeful decisions. 

Before we dig into the specifics of the new framework, I'd like to go over a few things around modern PR. 

The Inbound PR concept is now one year old. Happy birthday to my concept! (Tomorrow is the day!) 

As we've defined before, Inbound PR combines the best of two worlds − public relations and inbound marketing − and alleviates PR's biggest weakness (measurement) and inbound marketing's biggest challenge (content). 

One year deserves a proper celebration so I decided it's time for a monster blog posts of 2,800 words that digs a little deeper into the fundamental principles, tools and tactics of Inbound PR and provides multiple tips. 

For that, I thought I'd use the alphabet since becoming one year old is a good time to start learning the letters and put the basis in place. 

Here we go! 

The ABCs of Inbound PR: 

I got into PR about six years ago. Since then the PR industry has continuously being disrupted. 

That's probably happening to more or less any industry simply because of how fast technology is changing and how quickly ordinary people are embracing digital and are making decisions differently because of digital.

But I haven't seen this being said so much about the other industries as it has been for PR. Google "disruption of public relations" and you'll find multiple articles every year highlighting how PR needs to be disrupted, is ready to be disrupted or better be disrupted with real action. (And the list goes on.)

Fast forward to 2016 and we find the latest Global Communications Report from the Holmes Report pushing that message again — the scale of change is disrupting the PR industry but is PR really able to adapt to this shifting landscape? 

When we talk about outbound and inbound, this is how you should think about it: outbound means pushing messages out there to journalists or potential customers for volumes-sake so that it goes out and hopefully reaches as many people as possible; inbound means pulling the right people in with relevant messages that they find on their own and choose to consume of their own will whenever they decide to.

That's what's changed over the past few decades ‒ consumers have become far more sophisticated, educated and guarded with devices, tools and apps to ignore you. Or if you do your job well, to pay attention to you.

This is the world we live in ‒ a constant fight for attention because of a complete saturation with content and information everywhere, all the time, from anyone, brands and ordinary people.  

To build a sphere of influence in such a tough environment is a hard job. Usually, that's the job of PR people so I don't envy their new reality. But to stay relevant and manage to break through that attention bubble, PR people need to turn to inbound. They need to combine the good parts of the outbound world and use them for inbound.

Inbound PR focuses on all things digital across paid, earned, social and owned media (PESO) and with this post I want to show you a few ways in which you can turn traditional PR activities into Inbound PR activities. Here we go.

Square2Marketing – one of the most successful inbound marketing agencies in the US – wrote an interesting post about how stories are the foundation of inbound marketing. I agree. 

But stories are also the foundation of PR. PR people have always been great storytellers. It's what they do day in and day out – they tell the stories of their clients by engaging with various audiences, whether that's through writing press releases, blog posts and longer content formats like ebooks, or utilising social media, or even drafting speeches.  

It's what PR people excel at – content.

So it turns out, content is the centrepiece for both inbound marketing and PR, which is one of the reasons why inbound PR makes perfect sense.