Happy New Year, all! Time to finally kick off 2013 with some excellent articles that you may have missed during your holiday breaks, and bring to light some seemingly daunting but surmountable challenges this year for PR pros.

First up, there’s a great post in Forbes by CMO of Aprimo, Lisa Arthur, that is a must read: CMOs: Here’s How To Stay Relevant In 2013. Lisa explains that to stay relevant this year, marketing initiatives need to be:

1. Data-Driven
2. Customer-Centric and
3. Omnichannel.

Next up, Shift Comm’s VP of Marketing Technology (and marketing professor) Chris Penn put together a very useful clip about How PR Impacts SEO. 

Great take-away here is that SEO used to be just about links, but Google’s algorithm has changed so that things like SOCIAL, EARNED & OWNED MEDIA (cough, Inbound PR) – not just your own content, but other credible people/publications talking about you – have a huge impact on your search ranking. Content + Network = unbeatable strategy!

How PR Impacts SEO with Chris Penn

And last, one of my favorite reads this holiday season is by Shel Holtz – In the era of pageview journalism, the pitch doesn’t end when the story is published. The net here is if you, as a PR person, can help drive traffic to the stories journalists write about your clients, they may be more likely listen to you. I’ve actually seen this in action. Great tip!

What’s interesting (and perhaps daunting) about these three posts is that all of these marketing facets now fall under the PR umbrella. Yes, our job has always been to pitch and secure earned media and have a large network of influential folks. This is still very true (and critical!), BUT in 2013 and beyond we also have to be…

1. WRITERS – creators of owned media (blog articles, bylines, case studies, press releases)
2. SEO SAVVY – keeping in mind those kick ass keywords (in social, earned and owned media)
3. SOCIAL MEDIA MAVENS – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and DO NOT ignore Google+ (it’s GOOGLE!) and
4. DATA SCIENTISTS – a little hyperbole here, but to succeed, we need to be able to (1) track our results with all the web analytics and tools we now have at our fingertips, AND (2) turn company data into meaningful information and insights that will make headlines (see post Big Data = Big PR).

Writer. Extrovert. Scientist. It’s a marriage of the minds. Are you up to the challenge this year?