Blogs
Reading other blogs can be a great source of inspiration and has inspired a great many of my posts. Plus occasionally I get tagged in MeMe’s! Example.

Twitter
Links that have been shared by people I follow on Twitter have inspired a few of my blog posts and have even helped me at work. Example.

Newspapers / Magazines
Articles that attract my attention sometimes inspire my blog posts. They don’t even happen to be about social media or PR, often it’s just a case of commenting on an article from a PR point of view. Example.

Out of nowhere
I find that many of my best ideas come to me when I least expect them. A lot of my ideas have come to me when I’ve been lying in bed, trying to get to sleep and have had to get up to scrawl them down on a piece of paper. Example.

PR people
At least one of my posts has been inspired through creative blogger outreach. Example.

I tag Chris Norton, Richard Millington and Stephen Davies.

From editing client websites to writing blog posts and formatting html newsletters, web design is now a part of PR. Rather than having a digital team to deal with the online stuff, all PRO’s should have a good understanding of web design. PRO’s clearly don’t need to be equipped with the same level of skills as web designers but I think a basic knowledge of web design languages like CSS and HTML would certainly be a good idea.

Another thing I noticed when I updated this site was how quickly it had got out of date. Richard Millington reckons bloggers should update blogrolls weekly and site designs monthly. I agree, udating your blogroll and having a tinker with your site’s design is a great way to keep your blog looking fresh. It’s only been two or three months since I last updated my blog, but in that time Jed Hallam started working at Wolfstar PR, Stephen Davies started 3WPR, and I contributed to an eBook about Digital PR. All of which made parts of my blog and website out of date.

“The idea’s simple. We’re asking you to list the three communicators living or dead who have most influenced your way of thinking professionally and perhaps personally too. Who do you think the real innovators are? Who’s been most responsible for kicking the industry forward? And just who are the communication PRunks?”

Rather than pick three innovative communicators that have influenced me, I’ve chosen to pick three innovative inventors that have truly transformed the way people communicate, and thereby influenced every person working in the public relations industry.

Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone.
Bell invented the telephone in the late 19th century and changed the way we all communicate . The first successful phone call in 1876 started with this: “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.” I like that fact. I cannot imagine the PR industry without the telephone. Having to send press releases by post or telegram is unthinkable now in a world of 24/7 news. Without the telephone we’d have no fax machines, internet connections or e-mails either.

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web.
Berner-Lee invented the web just seventeen years ago in 1991 and in that short time has changed the PR industry in ways that we still don’t fully understand. Nowadays every business worth its salt has a company website and online coverage is often seen as more important than news in that very last century medium that is the printed press. Everyday PR’s across the world do research online, read the news, make press lists, engage in Blogger outreach campaigns, network with others in the industry, and many other things thanks to the web.

Ray Tomlinson, the inventor of e-mail.
Tomlinson wasn’t the first person to send an e-mail in 1971, but he was the first person to invent an e-mail system that let users send a message from one computer to another. Previously users could only send messages to other users who used the same computer. E-mail has thoroughly transformed the PR industry too. We use e-mail for everything from sending press releases to receiving information requests from journalists, and even brainstorming ideas with colleagues sat next to us. If only we didn’t have to put up with all that pesky spam…

Now it’s my turn to get tagging. I tag Richard Millington, Chris Norton, and Tom Harle.