It's been a while since we've had a "Why Work in PR?" interview but today we have Angharad Welsh sharing with us her PR career story and offering some very actionable advice for students and young professionals who want to learn more about the industry and how to get into it. 

Angharad and I have never met before but I discovered her article for the #FuturePRoof book project where I also wrote a chapter and I was intrigued. I found that, in addition to #FuturePRoof, we had a few other things in common, like Cheltenham where she lives and where I used to live and Muddywall - a magazine we both used to write for.  

I dug into Angharad's online presence a bit and I found that she had an interesting story to tell, coming from a broadcast journalism background. So I emailed her and I invited her to do an interview for the series. She accepted and I was delighted. 

Before you move onto the interview, don't forget to follow her on Twitter @Welsh_PR and check out her website too. 

(If you've missed any of the previous interviews, you can take a look as well: Richard Bailey, Pippa Hanson, Jessica Hodkinson, Chryssa Skodra, Farzana Baduel, Scott Guthrie and Sarah Hall.) 

Why Work in Public Relations: Interview with Angharad Welsh

We've spoken about PR measurement and how it's always been PR's biggest challenge. We've also delved into Inbound PR and how the concept provides a framework to really measure outcomes not just outputs.

But we haven't really dug into how you should plan your PR campaigns and programmes with metrics in mind. 

So today I want to introduce you to AMEC's new integrated evaluation framework which enables professionals to use the Barcelona Principles 2.0 to plan and tie PR activities back to organisational performance. 

The framework was launched in June and its interactive version is pretty cool. Most importantly, it's very intuitive and simple to use so that any new practitioner (or even a student) can follow the steps to plan, execute, measure and report on a fully integrated communications campaign.

The Planning Stage

The framework spans through each PESO channel and looks at the following points to get you to start planning your PR programme (note, the order is important): 

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.