Video is everywhere. More and more people view videos online on a daily basis. By 2015 online video watching is expected to double. No wonder YouTube is the third most visited website in the world and the second largest search engine after Google. Even video creation has become much easier with all these new gadgets and phones that allow us to make videos in a fairly good quality anywhere, anytime.

From a business perspective, video is becoming a must in marketing and PR strategies and campaigns to improve brand awareness and promote products and services.

But why video?

Simple. It’s a more compelling and interactive way of creating and sharing content that’s more engaging than plain text is. In the world of social media solely broadcasting a message is no longer effective; however storytelling is. Telling the story of your brand, your products or services through video can be way more exciting for your audience that is often not patient enough or doesn’t have the time to sit down and read through a lengthy product/service description. Demo videos for example are a great way of showcasing how your products work - something text often cannot explain well enough.

What’s more, videos can create a unique viewer experience much more realistic and life-like than text because they communicate feelings and expressions that can be easily perceived by yout audience. This is where the power of web videos for brand lies – in the ability to show their “human” side to build loyalty and trust. And by that, videos can be a great promotional campaign to boost your overall PR and marketing efforts.

Besides increasing online brand presence and consumer engagement videos can also improve SEO efforts - the chance of your business to appear in the first pages of a Google search. Most importantly, inspiring, provoking and funny videos are often shared, liked and commented by your audience, which can potentially make them go viral. 

A research by Dunkin’ Donuts and CareerBuilder shows the PR industry is the 4^th most caffeinated industry in the world! Apparently PR professionals rely a lot on coffee throughout the workday to keep their productivity and increase their energy and motivation, with 63% having two cups or more and 28% drinking three cups or more a day. How interesting!

These results come from the US, but in my opinion they’re transferrable to the rest of the world. However, with one exception – the UK, where tea seems to be very, very popular. For example, at the PR office where I work now half of the team drink tea and no coffee – that’s certainly impressive, don’t you think?

I am a coffee addict; I love the smell and the warmth! But I’ve been trying to reduce the amount of coffee I have a day and to choose decaf instead whenever possible. I guess that’s what many PR pros have been doing during the past 12 months too, because last year the PR industry was not the forth, but the second most caffeinated industry!

Does this make PR a stressful profession? I’ll leave that for you to decide. 

I have finally found some time to write this blog post! I’ve been planning it since my dissertation results came out end of July; at first I wanted to just present the survey findings in a text form with lots of explanations, but then I thought, no, an infographic would be perfect. And here it is - my first infographic! It shows in a nice visual way what I found from the survey I conducted with PR professionals earlier this year.

In addition to the online questionnaire I also carried out interviews with PR pros from the UK, some of which I will post soon. So, stay tuned! (update: here's the first interview with Heather Yaxley.)

As for the dissertation, now it’s time to brag a little bit :P I was very happy about my result and the positive feedback I got – my mark was 75%, or a First as it’s called in the UK (for the ones unfamiliar with the UK grading system, here’s a simple grade chart). I consider this an achievement, first because I don’t have much practical experience in Public Relations (or more precisely, didn’t have at the time), and second because I am not native in the language I wrote the dissertation in – English, which is just another foreign language for me.

As happy as I am, I still have a second dissertation to write and one more term back in Germany to finally finish my entire BA degree in International Business. Yes, I know how complicated it sounds…

So, getting to the point, below you’ll find the results of the online survey I conducted for the dissertation, which was entirely targeted at PR/Communications professionals (I have not included the participants’ profiling; however if you wish to have a look, just get in touch with me). Once again I would like to thank all survey (and interview) participants. I admit gathering enough questionnaire responses was one of the major difficulties of the project.

Again, the infographic below only shows a summary of the findings, the actual results are much more detailed and in-depth as all survey questions not only had pre-determined answer options, but also open-ended questions asking for explanations, more details and opinions. Nevertheless, the following should still give you some food for thought.

The results of this year's European Communication Monitor have been published and there are some intruiging insights into the public relations and communication management practice I am about to highlight here. 

With almost 2,200 practitioners from 42 countries this is the largest and most comprehensive transnational strategic communciation study worldwide that has been conducted annually since 2007.  

Again this year, the opinion that top management doesn't understand the communication practice has been shared by the majority of all participants - 84%. Furthermore, 75% admit that they are having difficulties proving the impact of communication management on organisational goals. These are the main barriers for the furher professionalisation of the industry. This in turn is fascinating as according to 82% of survey respondends organisations are nowadays interacting much more with stakeholders through various media outlets and have many more touchpoints with them in comparison to five years ago. 

This year’s Cannes Lions Festival showed again how creativity can make an impact. I was particularly happy about the Grand Prix winner in the PR category even from a very personal perspective. A role in the whole PR campaign that won played salsa – one of my biggest passions.

The so called ‘The Most Popular Song’ campaign was created by JWT San Juan for the Banco Popular De Puerto Rico Bank. The aim was to persuade society that working is actually good, as it seems that Puerto Rico’s problem is not people struggling to find jobs, but the country itself struggling to find people willing to work. Living on government help has become the way of life there (shocking, huh?).