As a discipline PR dates back to the beginning of the 20th century and is strongly linked to the growth of print, TV, radio, online. With the media always evolving PR has had to change and adapt to the power of each channel, old and new. The biggest change for PR however was the emergence of social media, which has affected the entire media landscape by putting the power of influence in the hands of normal people and has been the main reason why PR is now hardly recognisable to what it was a decade ago.

The growing importance of social media provoked a new era where ordinary people have a ‘say’ on every possible matter, anytime, anywhere. Social media has altered our lives enormously by giving everyone the opportunity to be a publisher and a communicator.

This means, the age of ‘we talk, you listen’, top-down style of company communication is now gone as social media has been the reason for the democratisation of information helping to change the way consumers form opinions and make decisions as well as enabling various stakeholders to easily and quickly engage in a two-way communication process with companies.

It still seems to me that many companies are not taking social media as seriously as they should – they either don’t believe in its potential as a communications and engagement channel or they don’t put enough effort into their activities to foster real relationships. This in my opinion really is a missed opportunity, so I wonder: What is it that is going to make skeptics open their eyes?

Social media has been around for over a decade now and has been gaining more and more power and relevance as it has become a normal part of people’s everyday life. It’s certainly not a hype, nor a fad. To substantiate this with some actual data, here’s what a research performed by Experian Hitwise found: In 2012 the UK spent 37 billion hours online; 13 minutes of each hour were dedicated entirely to social media.

Now that you've seen the interviews for my dissertation I conducted with Heather Yaxley, Shelley Fletcher-Bryant, Annie Bowden and Rob Brown, here's the final one to go online (I conducted a few more, but promised to keep them confidential and not publish them).

Below you’ll see the responses of Alison Theaker. Alison has over 30 years of experience in public relations and management as a practitioner and academic. Currently she is a freelance consultant at The Spark and an Associate Lecturer in Public Relations at London College of Communication. Alison is the author of ‘The Public Relations Handbook’ (a principal PR textbook since the 2000s) and co-author with Heather Yaxley of ‘The Public Relations Strategic Toolkit’ (a must read for anyone in PR). You can follow her on Twitter @thesparkuk.

LinkedIn is the largest professional social media network in the world and has been steadily growing in numbers and importance for businesses and individuals in the past years. The platform plays an influential role both for personal as well as for professional reasons, from an individual and from a company perspective. If you haven’t yet made use of the possibilities that LinkedIn offers and utilised its power, I encourage you to do so now!

To persuade you why you (and your business or company you work for) have to be on LinkedIn I’ve created a detailed infographic that shows quite a few relevant facts and figures about the platform and how members make use of it.

I’ve always been fascinated with infographics and this is the second one I created myself (the first one represented my dissertation findings; you can check it out here). I hope you find it useful. I would love to hear your comments :)

Just yesterday Pinterest officially launched its web-based analytics tool! This is truly great news! It was about time we get such figures coming directly from Pinterest itself, instead of having to rely on other third-party tools. The Pinterest analytics platform is absolutely free and allows site owners to track the engagement of their website visitors on the social network.

Such data can be extremely valuable especially for business accounts (which were launched a few months back) because it will help identify how exactly people interact with the content originating from their websites.

Here’s what the new analytics can tell you:

• how many pins have been pinned and repinned from your site
• how many people have pinned and repinned from your site
• how many times your pins have appeared in the main feed, in search results or on boards
• how many people have seen these pins
• how many impressions the content has generated
• how many people have visited your site from Pinterest
• a selection of your most recent, most repinned and most clicked pins

You can set a custom date range so that you can see how your activities have changed over time. You can also download the data allowing you to easily present the numbers offline.