I'm now very dedicated to ramping up my blog series "Why Work in PR?" as it looks like they are very helpful to you, dear PR students and young professionals. 

Today, it's Scott Guthrie who shares with us his PR career story and some fantastic guidance with three big tips on how to succeed in the PR industry.

It looks like I tend to meet other PR professionals on Twitter. Same happened with Scott and also through the #FuturePRoof book project that we both wrote chapters for and then started reading and tweeting each other's content more often afterwards. He writes regularly about communications, creativity and change on his blog so I encourage you to subscribe there to learn. And don't forget to follow him on Twitter @sabguthrie. 

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

Why Work in Public Relations: Interview with Scott Guthrie

1. As a short introduction, can you tell us a little bit about you and what you do?

I’m the Digital Director - Influencer Relations at Ketchum London. 

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.

It's been a while since we've had an interview for my blog series "Why Work in PR?" I hadn't forgotten about it but I didn't have the right person to go next yet. Now I do. 

Today, Farzana Baduel shares her PR experiences and some fantastic advice for students and young professionals.

Farzana and I 'met' on Twitter a few months ago, I was impressed by her profile, then I 'stalked' her on LinkedIn and was amazed by her achievements, building up her own very successful global PR agency. A true career that can you inspire you too and so I offered to interview her, and she gracefully accepted. I encourage you to follow her on Twitter and shoot her a friendly tweet about reading her story.  

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

Why Work in Public Relations: Interview with Farzana Baduel

1. As a short introduction, can you tell us a little bit about you and what you do?

I am the Managing Director of Curzon PR, an award‐winning global strategic communications firm with offices in London, New York, Dubai and soon to be launched in Delhi, and a doting Mother.

Dear PR students, how many of you are starting to work on your PR dissertations?

I'm guessing quite a few.

By now, many of you should have at least started planning the synopsis (i.e. topic, objectives, research methods and literature) and thinking abount the actual execution (i.e. doing the research and then the writing). I thought it would be a good time to share with you some useful tools to help you throughout that process.

In fact, the below tools are super helpful for any student or professional as they can be easily adopted into one’s daily life to improve planning, writing, productivity and creativity.

The list is not rank-based but aligned with the actual process a student goes through – from initial activities such as planning and research through to putting findings together and doing the actual writing.

Hope the tools help!

Top 10 Online Tools to Help with Your PR Dissertation: