Republished with permission from Leighton Interactive. 

I'm a millennial in marketing and a former TV journalist who geeks out over the concept of Inbound Public Relations (PR). Never heard of it? I'm about to blow your mind with simplicity. Here I go: 

TELL YOUR STORY FIRST.

In other words, don't wait for someone else to realize how great you are. Get the word out, and fast. The PESO model is still alive and well, but too many companies are ignoring one major part of the timeless marketing model - Earned Media. I'm a fan of cliche quotes. Here's one of my recent favorites. Literally, I want to shout this from the top of the tallest building in Downtown St. Cloud for all to hear. 

I see amazing marketing strategies in action as they create robust owned content, social media strategies, paid efforts, video, photo, and more. What many companies lack is third-party validation,

Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of doing a presentation at a great inbound marketing event in London organised by Whitehat SEO. 

It was a terrific audience, a terrific venue and a really fun experience. 

As always, the topic of my talk was Inbound PR. And this was probably one of the best presentations I've given on the topic which is why I want to share the recording of the talk with you today. 

In the video, you'll learn about: 

• why Inbound PR 
• how Inbound PR came about
• the 8 key steps you need to take to create your first Inbound PR strategy or campaign

Take a look: 

What You Need to Know About Inbound PR in 40 Minutes [Video]

Do you remember the days when Twitter had just come out and people were trying to figure out how to use it for business?

I do. In fact, I became fascinated with social media for business. I was still a student but I could already see the massive shifts happening in the communications world.

Even though I studied International Business, my passion for comms made me follow big names such as Brian Solis and David Meerman Scott who were pioneers in how to do PR the modern way.

And so I decided to pursue a career in PR. I read every book on PR that I could get my hands on, I interned in PR and I worked part-time in a PR agency during my final year at university.

I tried to learn everything I could.

I did everything - I wrote press releases, I pitched national and regional media through email and cold calls, I worked with bloggers, I managed social media channels.

It was great. I learned a lot.

But I could see that even though I worked so hard and my agency team did too, we were basically just slaves in the eyes of the client. They didn’t consider us strategic advisers. We were just implementers and every time we tried to convince the client to do something new, it was close to impossible.

Republished with permission from ITPR's blog. 

Inbound PR has changed the way we deliver campaigns for the better. Whether it’s being able to track and present our results or the way we interact with journalists, we’ve seen a significant uptick in PR results and, more importantly, client happiness!

As we’ve spoken about before, the concept has had a profound effect in generating new business, but there are still a few challenges with Inbound PR that we’ve seen cropping up again and again when trying to implement Inbound PR campaigns. 

What is Inbound PR? 

Inbound PR is an evolution of traditional PR in an effort to keep up with constant changes in the digital age. While traditional PR has purely relied on coverage to prove its worth, Inbound PR goes beyond that to delve deeper into the metrics and outcomes that help meet business goals.

Don’t get me wrong – any PR campaign should aim to get you a bucketful of coverage, but if you’re not tracking who’s clicked through to your website as a result of that coverage, how will you be able to prove the effect of it?

This is a guest post by Mike Davies from ITPR.

Social media is a collection of platforms which allows businesses, organisations and individuals to engage with an audience, share content, gain awareness and “be part of conversations”.

If you think that sounds pretty similar – if not the same – to what public relations is all about then you’d be right.

You would also think, then, that public relations would be the natural “owner” of social media campaigning but, as with many other digital shifts, the PR industry as a whole was painfully slow to adapt to the potential of social media.

To fill the vacuum, dedicated social media agencies spawned their very own niche in the market.

Even now, many PR agencies still fail to understand or at least utilise social media in their campaign plans.

This, despite the PRCA’s recent PR and Communications Census finding that Online Communications has increased in importance for PR within the last year, according to 28% of those surveyed.

But with Inbound PR, some agencies are finally realising the potential for their campaigns and for their clients to use social media to reach out directly to prospects, customers and journalists and to increase the impact of their Earned media coverage.