I don’t write about cars. I don’t really even write about gadgets. But I’m writing about the Chevy Volt electric car today. Why? Because the folks at Chevy are using influencer targeting as a method to get the word out about their car. No, I’m not succumbing to the power of a good pitch. The car is cool and there’s a fun video below featuring Robert Scoble and Guy Kawasaki that will show you some of that. I want to share the influencer outreach approach they’re using as an example of good PR and interaction with the social media space.

Cristi Landy, Volt’s product manager, told me technology bloggers and influencers were logical outreach targets for them because of the innovative technology in the Volt. The car not only features a mostly electric engine that can go up to 40 miles without using gas, complete with the pick-up, torque and handling you’re used to from a gas-powered vehicle, but is tech and gadget heavy. The car will have a smart phone app that enables you to lock, unlock, heat, cool, check charge status and more from wherever you are. For folks like Robert Scoble, Guy Kawasaki and Leo Laporte, who all write about technology and have large audiences, the outreach targeting was spot on.

What Chevy did for these influencers is invite them to test drive the car and experience the power first hand. The only thing they had to agree to was be interviewed for Chevy’s content after. There was no commitment to produce content about the car in the arrangement. Just test it, tell us what you think and you’re done. Chevy would produce all the content they wanted. Anything that Scoble, Kawasaki, Laporte or even I produced was gravy.

SME-TV: Robert Scoble, Guy Kawasaki & Jason Falls test drive the Chevy Volt from Jason Falls on Vimeo.

What Chevy did was give influencers in a relevant target an exclusive opportunity. The Volt isn’t on the market yet and not everyone can test drive one. They allowed us to take all the pictures, video and ask all the questions we wanted. There were no complex legal issues, trademark talks or even proprietary information non-disclosures. Just drive it, tell us what you think and thanks for coming. The individuals they chose are naturally going to produce content, even if it’s just a Tweet about the car. Certainly Chevy would love it if all the people they targeted blogged about their experience, but they’ll take what they get and be happy with it.

Perhaps more importantly, the audiences that are inspired and excited about new technologies will get a glimpse from their favorite source for tech-related information.

The point here is to keep in mind that your brand or client may find unusually productive niches of authorship in peripheral verticals to your core. Chevy didn’t target auto bloggers with this effort. (I’m sure they did separately, but they got involved in South by Southwest for non-auto bloggers.) If you’re a spirits brand, the spirit and cocktail bloggers are your core but radiating from those on your list should be the food, night life and lifestyle bloggers.

It’s not hard to think a little outside the box from your core media list but you’d be surprised how few do it. Just a reminder that even a social media and PR blogger might find something interesting in your electric car.

Dislcosure: Chevy’s arrangements at South by Southwest included transporting me to and from the mall where the road course was set up. They also extended an unrelated dinner invitation (which I accepted) to join several other bloggers and notables from the social media space including David Meerman Scott, Peter Shankman, Valeria Maltoni, C.C. Chapman, Liz Strauss and more. Chevy bought. Otherwise, I received no payment or promise for writing this. In fact, because I don’t focus on tech specifically, the Chevy folks didn’t really expect me to write about it.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Cadillac Converj Is GM’s Other Electric Car Competitor To The Chevy Volt (crenk.com)
• First real Chevy Volt battery rolls off assembly line (dvice.com)
• Is The Chevy Volt Right For You? (treehugger.com)
• Behind the wheel of the Chevy Volt (news.cnet.com)

I was dumbfounded when I read a recent New York Times article about mommy bloggers that indicated a conference session topic at an event called Bloggy Bootcamp was how to let public relations firms know you don’t work for free. A few months ago, I reached out to a prominent mommy blogger on Twitter to let her know that I had a client whose products she might be interested in – not a pitch, just a light toss that indicated I may pitch her down the road. She responded by saying, “I’ll be happy to work with your client. My fee is $125 per hour.” I was stunned.

It seems that some bloggers (not just the mommy kind) have a vast misunderstanding of what public relations professionals are supposed to do or be used for. It also seems that some think receiving a pitch for a product somehow entitles them to call themselves consultants and charge hourly rates to someone else for writing content for their own website. Far be it from me to criticize a blogger’s ability to make money, but these attitudes deeply concern me. While the media landscape is evolving to account for new media roles, blogger ignorance to how traditional communications and marketing works may forever ruin the notion of an unbiased media.

Here are some thoughts that all bloggers and public relations professionals should consider to help us all get along and prosper:

Soliciting Money For Your Blog Is Advertising Sales

Whether you are selling banner advertising, known in the advertising world as “online media,” or advertorial content (yes, blog posts) for a product or service in exchange for a fee or sponsorship, you are selling an advertisement. When you publish that advertisement, the Federal Trade Commission requires you to disclose what you received in exchange for that post or content element. The advertisement, whether it’s a banner ad or advertorial content, is referred to as paid media. You, the blogger/media outlet are being paid to display or post the advertising message.

Should you want to ask someone at a brand or company to consider paying you money for advertorial coverage, banner advertisements and similar online media, you typically would call upon that company’s media buyer or media planner, the marketing director or other individual who handles buying online media, not a public relations representative.

Public Relations Is Not Paid Media

The term “paid media” refers to any element of a brand’s communications that is purchased from a publishing company (i.e. advertising). Editorial coverage (not advertorial, which is paid media) is earned media that a brand receives from publishing companies because the information was compelling enough for its audience to cover the information. While some earned media occurs naturally in the course of a journalist or bogger talking about the industry, public relations professionals are agents of a brand who attempt to proactively inspire or entice earned media coverage by pitching story ideas and funneling brand information to media outlets.

PR Should Not Pay For Coverage

While there are always exceptions, public relations professionals do not have an ad budget. They do not purchase advertising for companies, and shouldn’t. PR pros either successfully pitch relevant stories to writers who are covering the topic, or they don’t. Bloggers should know enough about public relations to know they either have relevant information to help you write better, more well-rounded stories or they don’t.

Bloggers Have No Obligation To PR

Like their traditional media brethren, bloggers are not obligated to respond to public relations professionals. Bloggers do not have to cover a brand, respond to the pitch, read the press release or consider covering the item the PR professional is offering. If a blogger chooses to respond to a pitch, there are really only two appropriate responses:

• Yes, I’m interested.
• No, I’m not.

A Bloggers’ Obligation Is To His Or Her Audience

While a blogger doesn’t have to communicate with public relations professionals at all, there’s a pretty good chance they write about the industry or even the company that the PR pro represents from time to time. At some point, the blogger may need information about the company or a product they can’t find online, a logo or company image to use with a piece they’ve written, a quote or reaction from the company to some piece of news or a clarification or explanation of something the company does. Public relations professionals are the appropriate contacts for inquiries. Not communicating with the PR folks at all could limit your ability to serve your audience with accurate information. Furthermore, sometimes the pitch or the press release is about some news or a new product that the blogger’s audience should know about. By ignoring pitches, or demanding paid media treatment of said information, a blogger is doing a disservice to his or her audience as that limits or adulterates the information the audience is given.

The Traditional Method Has Merit

The media and public relations landscape is changing. Bloggers are essentially the first publishing channel and media outlet which play both paid and earned media roles. Newspapers, magazines, television and radio outlets have journalists to produce the content and sales teams to solicit or handle advertising. The division of these roles is an important protection for the audience to help them trust a media outlet’s content is not unduly biased. It’s kind of like the separation of church and state. Bloggers dissolve that separation which public relations has yet to figure out appropriate reaction to. I worry that if bloggers continue to fail to see the importance of that separation and PR’s evolution is to being regularly paying for coverage, then the notion of an unbiased, fair and accurate media could be lost forever.

Bloggers Are Bloggers, Not Marketing Consultants

I researched the aforementioned mommy blogger who wanted to charge my client $125 per hour to pitch her and discovered some interesting facts. She had no work experience or formal training in marketing, public relations or advertising. She had a blog with a nice sized audience, but had worked in a non-marketing service industry field until she had children and opted to stay at home. While plenty smart, she was unqualified to consult with a company on how to market or promote their products. Sadly, there are thousands of bloggers (and social news site vote-getters) out there just like her who think (or are being taught by conferences like Bloggy Bootcamp) that being a successful blogger makes them qualified to consult with companies on marketing. When she told me she would “work with” my client for $125 an hour, I replied, “Ummm. I’m the consultant. You are either interested in telling your audience about the products or you’re not. We won’t be paying you to pitch you.”

Sadly, some companies apparently do. It’s not a slight against the blogger, but against the companies. Brands should not pay for media coverage. You either make a compelling pitch that wins the interest of the blogger or you don’t get covered. If that blog’s audience means that much to you, add them to your media buying plan and see if you can purchase advertising there, or come up with a better pitch.

Why The Current Environment Is Fuzzy

Bloggers don’t have an obligation to be fair and balanced. They don’t need public relations contacts the way traditional media outlets do. While bloggers are often not trained journalists, they also aren’t normally skilled at positioning their work for advertising sales and monetization. Bloggers want to make money doing what they do, and deserve to do so. Brands want their products and services represented well in traditional and new media content, and they deserve that, too. What a blogger has that brands want is editorial content which is not something you can buy in traditional media channels. Bloggers want to sell it. Companies are being asked to play by new rules that cross established ethical boundaries. The environment is evolving, but there are no hard, fast rules for what’s right and wrong here.

Yes, consumers are smart enough to find content they trust on their own. No, there isn’t just one way, or even a right way, to monetize a blog or even prescribe content for an audience. But bloggers should understand the issues at hand, the environment in which they’ve thrust themselves by becoming a publishing agent and how the world of advertising and public relations work to be most successful at what they do. It’s not that PR doesn’t have to change, too, but that bloggers should understand the context of the marketplace.

Romero was quoted in the New York Times article as telling the crowd they were there to be seen, “as a professional.” If you want them to be seen as professionals, then you should teach them about the profession (communications) they are now a part of, not how to show their ignorance of it.

As in need of evolution as that profession may be.

For more great thoughts on how bloggers should handle, PR, see my pal Tamar Weinberg’s Blogger Etiquette post.

Image: Cash register by Lisa F. Young on Shutterstock.com

Collaboration, though vague in definition, seems to be one of the more powerful end results of successful social media efforts. Whether it’s collaborating internally to improve business processes and efficiencies or gang-tackling a product improvement with your own customers, social media tools seem to tear down silos and connect people across disciplines for the betterment of the company.

I’ve been asked to participate in a live web-TV show next week on collaboration for BusinessWeek. New Tools for Collaboration – Best Practices for Building a Competitive Advantage will be the subject of BusinessWeek’s live video webinar on Thursday, March 18 at 1 p.m. ET/10 a.m. PT. I’ll join Bloomberg BusinessWeek Assistant Managing Editor Jim Ellis and fellow panelists Harry McCracken of the Technologizer blog and Richard Migliori, EVP and Chief Medical Officer at UnitedHealth Group for a live discussion of the world of collaborative software and practices.

While I have plenty to say on the topic, I’d love to take your ideas and examples to BusinessWeek’s program. Please jump in the comments below and tell me how your company or business uses collaborative software. What platforms and programs to you use to improve internal workflow? What examples of collaborating with external audiences can you share? How has the use of the tools and principles of collaboration improved or changed how you do business?The discussion will certainly enlighten and inform the readers and fellow commentors here. And the best examples will probably percolate to the BusinessWeek discussion next week.

Tell me your collaboration story below. Then go register for the BusinessWeek live event. Doing so means you’re collaborating with me to talk about collaborating. Now that’s pretty cool.

The comments are yours.

South by Southwest Interactive begins in ernest tomorrow as geeks from everywhere descend upon Austin, Texas. If you’ve heard of “South by,” you’ve probably been told it’s an amazing experience that is largely defined by parties and networking. Conference productivity is often tossed by the wayside at these things, but if you don’t plan for business success while attending them, then why are you going?

Conferences of any kind are only as productive as you make them. You can to to every session and learn a lot. You can go to none and do the same. If you’re goals are more business driven, the hallways and blogger lounges are where the action is, if not the exhibition floor. But you can’t just show up and be productive.

As a veteran, albeit a self-appointed title, of many a conference, summit, seminar and boot camp, here’s how I ensure the trip is worthwhile:

Have A Goal

Do you want to learn? Do you want to get in front of venture capitalists and pitch your start-up idea? Do you want to forge a relationship with an influential blogger that can help spread the word about your business? Do you want to find a new job? Know what you’re trying to accomplish so you have a litmus test for decision making. When you’re faced with the decision of going to lunch with your buddies or attending a sponsored lunch/Tweet-up where you know several willing VCs will be milling about, ask: Which will help accomplish my goal of getting funding?

Have A Plan

Whether it’s mapping out the sessions you want to attend or the parties you want to be seen at, going in blindly means you’re going to wind up following everyone else. If you do that, you get sucked into watching them accomplish their goals, if they have any. While the camaraderie and relationship building with the people you know is a big part of getting something out of a conference, it can also be a diversion from what you want to do. Sure, being flexible and going with the flow is good in some instances, but don’t fall into the, “I’ll just do it tomorrow,” trap.

Have A Pitch

Whether you have a defined business objective for the conference or are just going to soak it all in, put together an elevator speech for who you are and what you do. You’ll meet a ton of people. Don’t leave any of them wondering about you, but make your pitch short and concise. Perhaps even do one in 140 characters to force out the B.S.

“I am a speaker, educator and consultant building an online learning community for those interested in understanding social media and Internet technologies for their business.”

Have A Limit

Time will be of the essence in networking, listening to product pitches, pitching your own to as many people as possible, attending sessions and events. Unless you’re locked in to conversations with the people who are helping you get to your goal for the event, know when to step away nicely. I get pitched a lot at conferences. People want me to blog about their gizmo, tool, platform and program. I listen to each pitch, make a quick determination as to whether or not it’s something I might write about, then ask the person to email me details if it is. Some are more persistent than others, but almost everyone understands at that point, I need to move on and I will take the time to look at your thing. Worst case scenario, look at the time and say, “I’m sorry. Maybe we can catch up later? I’ve got to get to a thing. Hit me on Twitter!” It’s polite and non-committal.

Have Another Limit

Most people know that I enjoy a good party. In fact, my South by Southwest experience this year is largely defined by Firefly Funnel Cake Fandango, which is a social event with yummy spirits and snacks. It would be easy for me to have too much fun this week in Nashville, Little Rock and Dallas en route to Austin, then spend the weekend recovering while SXSW ensues. This is one major reason the spirits companies remind us to drink responsibly. Imagine what you want to feel like tomorrow. Base how much you drink tonight on that.

Have Play Time

The evenings at South by Southwest, and many other conferences for that matter, are filled with fun. Sometimes there are daytime events that fit that bill as well. Factor some fun into your experience, rest up for it and plan on letting loose. But schedule the fun around your business goals, not the other way around. Think about it this way, would you rather walk away from the conference with a killer new client, job opportunity or influential friend, or just a killer hangover and a tattoo you can’t explain?

Whatever your goals for South by Southwest, or other conferences you might attend, I hope you reach them. I’ve got my docket full to hit mine. See you in Austin.

Social media monitoring firm Sysomos is launching a free location-based monitoring service today it’s calling FourWhere. The tool mines publicly available Foursquare data (tips) and mashes them up with a Google map of the location you’ve entered. There’s no sign-up or account required. It’s just clever link-bait and enthusiasm-building from one of the emerging players in the social media monitoring market.

My first reaction to this was, “Can’t you just search for a location in Foursquare and get the same thing?” Apparently not. Foursquare seems to offer only the actual location (e.g. – “Toast, Louisville, Ky.”) not the area. (A search for “Louisville, Ky.” produced next to nothing.) If FourWhere provides that, it will be an improvement over what is available.

I got a sneak peek and logged in. You pick a location on the map, right click and choose to show venues or comments. What you get is an immediate scan of any Foursquare info in the immediate area. This is extremely useful if you’re looking for recommendations and referrals and, if FourWhere catches on, or similar services emerge, it makes a business’s use of location-based services all the more important in their social media marketing activities.

According to Sysomos co-founder Nilesh Bansal, the service will soon add information from Yelp, Gowalla, Twitter and other social sources. Now that would be pretty compelling. Keep an eye on it to see what happens.

To their credit, Sysomos has sold itself as offering geo-targeting for quite a while when other social media monitoring services have shied away from it. Offering geo-location for blogs, Tweets, Facebook posts, etc., is not an exact science. You can’t use IP address information to do it. DirecTV satellite users in, say Iowa, still register as being from Los Angeles, for example. So there has to be some public data mining and matching to know a certain blogger hails from Louisville. If you’re using machines to do it, it’s tough. If you’re using humans, it doesn’t scale.

Now that location-based services are offering more data (until recently it was pretty much Yelp and a couple review sites) the Sysomoses of the world are jumping on offering that information up in useful and compelling ways. We’ll see how well it works. Kudos to them for jumping on the opportunity.

For more on Sysomos, check out my review of their offering from November of 2009 when they added Facebook data mining to their Heartbeat services.

And when you jump into FourWhere, come back and tell us what you think. I’m sure Nilesh and gang will be monitoring what you have to say. It’s kinda what they do.

Some of you know my dad, Chillie Falls, owns a funnel cake trailer. He even blogs about his adventures selling cakes all over Virginia and elsewhere. You also probably know that I’ve been known to put on a party or two in my time. And yeah, sometimes they sound like an odd combination of locations and themes, but we always wind up blowing the roof off the joint.

When Dad joined Twitter and started chatting with all the freaks and geeks in Internetland, he said, “I’d love to go to one of these conferences and meet all these folks.” Well, get ready, Dad.

Big Red, Dad and I are road trippin’ it to Austin, Texas, to bring Firefly Funnel Cake Fandango to South by Southwest. But we’re stopping along the way to make sure as many people as possible get some of that Funnel Cake Fandango magic. Make sure to follow the action on Dad’s blog where we’ll be posting video diaries of the fun … which may wind up NSFW, so ease up in the cubicle farms, if you know what I mean.

Each night, Dad will pull Big Red up to an exclusive location and serve funnel cakes to anyone willing to buy. Firefly Vodka thought the trip was a cool idea and is sponsoring our shenanigans, too. Drink specials will be had, my friends. (Not to mention, Dad’s been working on a special Firefly Vodka funnel cake glaze. So much for my diet, right?)

We’re stopping at three exclusive locations en route and we want you to join us for a Firefly Funnel Cake Fandango FEEDUP:

Tuesday, March 9
Nashville, Tennessee – Corner Pub, 2000 Broadway

RSVP FOR NASHVILLE AT TWTVITE.COM

Wednesday, March 10
Little Rock, Arkansas – Big Whiskeys – 225 E. Markham Street

RSVP FOR LITTLE ROCK AT TWTVITE.COM

Thursday, March 11
Dallas, Texas – Black Finn’s – 4440 Beltline Road – Addison

RSVP FOR DALLAS AT TWTVITE.COM

The trip culminates with our opening night in Austin, Friday, March 12, for the official Firefly Funnel Cake Fandango at Molotov on West Sixth. Check out the RSVP page on Eventbrite. Social Media Explorer and Blue Clover Studios join forces with Firefly Vodka to put on a regular hootenanny. Come see some killer augmented reality, taste test (or just taste … or test) Firefly Vodka, get one of Dad’s famous funnel cakes (special ones have the Firefly glaze) and hang with some cool cats.

Austin is nuts and parties abound on Friday night. But it doesn’t take much to swing by for a funnel cake! We’ll be there from 8:30 until 1 … or so.

Nashville … Little Rock … Dallas … Austin … We can’t wait to hang with ya. Come see Dad, me, get a funnel cake and try some Firefly. Oh … and drink responsibly. See you soon.

Sunday’s Courier-Journal, Louisville’s daily newspaper, is one of the few tactile media publications I still read. I get the paper every day delivered in my RSS feeds, but Sunday mornings with local newspapers are still useful, if for the experience alone. My wife enjoys perusing the coupons. I like reading feature stories and the agate page of the sports section to see items from out-of-market or small college teams the paper never covers.

Sunday, I ran across an interesting article about Fred Greenhalgh’s podcasts at Finalrune.com. The piece was a nice explanation of how Greenhalgh is sort of bringing back the radio drama through his podcasts. The article was a nice read and of decent length and gave me a few moments to revisit my days in radio, but also appreciate the modern medium of Internet podcasts and what can be done with them.

But then I realized something very, very sad.

Image via Wikipedia

The article, found in the Sunday Forum section of the Courier-Journal, was written by Barry Newman. Of the Wall Street Journal. Fred Greenhalgh lives in Portland, Maine. Not a shred of this article had anything to do with Louisville, Kentucky or the surrounding area. On the surface, that might seem like a nonsense criticism of the Courier-Journal’s lack of local focus and wire copy back-falling. I did enjoy the article, after all. But when you consider the similar story of J.C. Hutchins, you see my point.

J.C. Hutchins couldn’t get 7th Son published. The Louisville native had created a masterful first attempt at a book, but publishers were frigid on it. Not one to give up on a dream, Hutchins turned the unpublished work into a published one using the Internet. The 7th Son podcasts grew virally until legions of Clone Army insiders were downloading, blogging, taking pictures in Clone Army shirts and more. The imagination of Hutchins’s futuristic, sci-fi story captured that of thousands.

So much so that a publisher finally realized the mistake and published 7th Son.

A Louisville native, product of Atherton High School, Western Kentucky University graduate, using podcasting, creating audio experiences that not only capture imaginations like radio dramas, but lead to overcoming publishing world obstacles and turning his book dream into reality … that’s the story the Courier-Journal needs to tell. Sadly, it hasn’t. Searching the C-J finds no mention of J.C. Hutchins anywhere. Other local newspapers don’t fare much better.

While there’s nothing wrong with the Courier-Journal telling both stories, and one example does not an industry fault make, the facts of the matter are this: The Wall Street Journal charges for its online content because it is original and serves its audience supremely. The Courier-Journal and similar local newspapers could never get away with monetizing their content because they’re so busy finding wire copy (ironically from the Wall Street Journal) to fill a spot in their Sunday Forum that they don’t even notice stories that their audiences would really care about.

While local newspapers aren’t exactly facing competition from primary new media sources (yet), they must get rid of the notion that they are to supply the entire world’s news and notes to their readers. Or at least realize that if their content isn’t locally relevant and of service to its geographic footprint, it is less relevant than other mediums that are. We will pay for good content. We won’t pay for our local newspaper’s online version. And yes, those two concepts are very much connected.

Corporate blog expert Debbie Weil has asked the question, “Should blogging be the hub of your social media efforts?” Tomorrow afternoon, Jay Baer and Chris Baggott will take a stab at answering that in a Compendium Blogware webinar of the same name. Sign up now. Seats are limited.

While Debbie has a fantastic discussion going on in the comments section of the post mentioned above, I thought it appropriate to talk a bit about the hub theory of blogging and ensure the notion is looked upon in the proper perspective.

First, we need to assume that we’re talking about blogging for business or corporations. This differs from personal/hobby or media blogs because with each you have slightly different purposes, goals and outcomes of success.

Image by base10 via Flickr

Personal blogs are ego driven. They are either personal opinion platforms for the author or the content is almost solely what the author chooses to write. Hobby blogs are much the same. Media blogs are focused on driving content around an audience’s needs or interests to draw eyeballs and increase exposure to the site’s advertising. The best corporate blogs are focused on driving business success while serving the audience’s needs.

As an example, look at Fairytale Brownies. They have a corporate blog which has a prescribed goal of winning search results around specific keywords. Their Facebook, Twitter and YouTube presences clearly drive people back to the blog for more information (along with other site-specific content that serves its respective community there). The blog is clearly their hub for connecting with customers.

If you visited their blog in February, you found specific calls to action for Valentine’s Day themed promotions. When you clicked through, you were taken to custom landing pages to buy Valentine’s Day brownies for your loved one. With similar approaches around the year (see St. Patrick’s Day ideas there now), Fairytale Brownies have driven thousands of visitors to their e-commerce site and report an impressive 13 percent conversion rate among those visitors to qualified leads. While they do not disclose specific financials, they have shared a 170 percent return on their investment in business blogging.

The reason (though I’m sure Baggott wants me to tell you it’s because they use Compendium) is because their blog is a hub for their social media efforts. They do participate genuinely on Facebook and Twitter, answering specific questions, thanking fans and the like, but continually bring the focus of the company’s social media efforts back to the blog and e-commerce opportunities. The clear focus to drive customers to the blog, thus giving them the options to click through and purchase is what drives their online success.

Can social outposts be your hubs? Sure. Are they as effective? I don’t think so. You can control you blog completely. Focusing that content on winning search results is easier to execute than on Facebook or Twitter. The more search traffic you can drive, coupled with the social media traffic you move from your outposts, the more your efforts are optimized.

For more, check out the webinar with Jay and Chris tomorrow. It’s free and will certainly be full of great information.

In the meantime, what do you think? Is a blog best used as the hub of your social media efforts? What about focusing your activities on Facebook or Twitter? The comments, as always, are yours.

Related articles by Jason Falls and Zemanta

• Corporate Blog Success Begins And Ends With Business Metrics (Social Media Explorer)
• Should a Blog or Twitter be Your Social Media Hub? (socialmediatoday.com)
• Companies Should Organize For Social Media In A Hub-And-Spoke Model (Forrester Research)

Let’s get one thing straight about press releases: They are not the primary driver for good public relations. Words on paper does not a relationship make. They are, however, an important component to delivering information to those who wish to cover your organization, event or company. For most, local press releases — those sent to media outlets in a specific geographic boundary or target — are the lifeblood of publicity. The PR 2.0 world kinda forgot about that. Thankfully, readMedia has a solution that serves the local press release target, serves up web and social media-friendly release tools and helps clients appear in online news aggregators like Google News, all for a reasonable price.

In a nutshell, a readMedia customer signs up for a low subscription price (more in a moment), selects the geographic region they are targeting, calls out the media offered from a readMedia-curated database, adds any they see fit to add, enters the press release in the system and the distribution is done. Releases are emailed (or faxed based on the media outlet’s preference … yes, some people apparently still fax) posted to the online news aggregation services and placed in an online newsroom. From there, media can embed the releases using an iFrame mechanism (see below for an example) and grab multimedia or other assets the customer makes available.

The client can then grab a widget of their own release headlines to use on their Facebook page, blog or website, embed the releases wherever they like or share across several social networks. The service is not yet set up to, nor meant to, replace your own website or even media page/news room, but gives you the tools to dress your website up with a newsroom feed and share mechanisms.

Now, I’m sure a few of you who are all social media’d up are saying, “Well, isn’t that what PitchEngine is?” No. PitchEngine doesn’t have a media database attached to it. (Although I caught wind they were announcing one today.) As of Friday on PitchEngine, you build a social media press release. Driving people to it is up to you (though they certainly have a community of readers and social tools baked in as well.) And even if PitchEngine adds a media database back-end to their offering, it won’t likely be built to be hyper-local in focus.

readMedia’s front page sells the service as good for State Agencies, Local Governments or Schools. But it’s as appropriate for local or regional businesses as it is for these type organizations. Still, as a former college public relations director, I can see how this can be mighty useful. (And that’s without the hometown press release program they have … more in a moment.)

I logged in to test the service and picked the Lexington, Ky. metro area, my former primary market when PR director at Georgetown College many moons ago. Turns out to use the readMedia service for that market, I only have to pay $29.00 per month for up to 50 contacts. The maximum fee would be $49.00 per month for 250 contacts and five user accounts. The per DMA, volume pricing automatically makes a cool, Web 2.0 PR service affordable for smaller market businesses.

When I reviewed the media list, I was impressed. They had all the main players, many hometown weeklies in outlying towns like Nicholasville and Winchester and even several local radio stations with news departments. For a company that doesn’t use a large media database company but rather builds and curates the lists themselves (with the help of client feedback, of course) readMedia impressed me.

I got hold of a client’s newsroom as well. The Nathan Littauer Hostpital “news room” is really just a list of release headlines. They have more graphically-driven information positioned on their website and use readMedia as a media utility. All readMedia “news rooms” are like this now, but they tell me a more designed, customizable presentation is on the way soon. Littauer’s most recent news, a story of a citation as being a progressive facility for energy conservation from Thursday, came up (as of Friday) as the top Google News result for “hospital energy conservation,” so the news postings are working well.

The embed-offering of the release is even strong because it’s branded, but in subtle fashion, making it easy to use on any website or blog with little awkwardness in design.

And since everything is digitally-driven, they deliver a nice analytics report that tells you how many folks view, embed and share  your news, plus where your stats rank against other releases in their system, etc.

So for local-based media relations efforts, readMedia is the real deal. Smart, easy to use, reliable database service that can be customized to your liking as well, all with smart Web 2.0 tools.

And then I looked at their offering for schools. Sure, this type of approach isn’t going to resonate with everyone, but not only are there tens of thousands of education public relations professionals in the U.S. alone, but in certain instances, this could apply beyond education.

readMedia’s pricing for schools is based on your student enrollment and geared toward hometown releases, a program that allows colleges to send press releases to the local newspapers of all their students (for Dean’s List announcements, etc.) regardless of geographic centricity to the institution. A college with a class size of 2,500 can run a hometown release program using readMedia for just $39.00 per month. I would have paid 10 times that amount when I was having to send 800 hometown press releases out each semester at Georgetown.

As you can tell, I really dig readMedia and what they offer. For the price and the service, I don’t know of anyone offering something comparable. The service’s focus on local press release distribution sets them apart. As one readMedia client told Amy Mengel, readMedia’s new inbound marketing director, using the big media database companies for local press release services is like using a 747 to cross the street. readMedia is a targeted service for people who need it. And well worth checking out.

Now, it would be remiss of me to not disclaim the hell out of this review. Press releases are a piece of your public relations arsenal. They should never be sent to media members who do not ask for them, in my opinion. Releases are tools for more information after the reporter has said, “Yes, I’m interested.” Blasting releases to your list should only happen when you have culled that list to ensure the media members on it write about the topic your release covers, their audience is potentially interested in the subject and they know and approve of you putting them on a distribution list.

(I’ll pause while some PR people curse me a few times.)

A press release is not a pitching mechanism. Your personal outreach to the media outlet is. Pitch first. Release if requested. Follow that framework and you’ll see better results.

And if you’re focused on local press release distribution, readMedia can help you get them, too.

It seems like the one question I inevitably get from people around the country is, “What’s next?” There’s always an implication that they mean, “Which social network is the next Twitter or the next Facebook?” My answer is normally that I don’t know that there will be a next Facebook or Twitter. Sure, there might be, but I see the Web 2.0 boom settling down and becoming more about consolidation than more companies popping up to stake a claim on user’s time.

Instead of worrying about whether or not Foursquare is the next big thing, I think social media marketers, public relations professionals and communicators should focus on the technology. The networks and applications won’t change much. Sure, you need to watch them, understand them, and find ways to communicate, provide value to those communities and so on, but the next big thing will be predicated on function, not form.

If I had to pick one “next big thing” I would say that it’s already happening and it’s mobile. Smart phones happened fast. Because of the open source culture of the web and Apple’s ability to come to its senses and let any developer build applications for their iPhone platform, the technology got ahead of the users. Instead of playing with a machine we couldn’t visualize how to use, we suddenly had easy apps that did real things for us literally at our finger tips.

Web development was the next big thing in 1998. Community development was the next big thing in 2008. Mobile development is the next big thing now, and it’s already happening.

Do yourself and your company a favor and mark down these dates and locations and send your most likely candidate to be a mobile developer to one of the MobileX conferences coming to Columbus, Chicago, Atlanta, Nashville and Lexington, Ky. You (or they) will learn from some awesome mobile thinkers already doing it.

MobileX is coming to Columbus, Ohio, on March 4; Chicago, Ill., on March 5; Atlanta, Ga., on March 26; Nashville, Tenn., on March 27 and Lexington, Ky., on April 16. It’s run by my buddies Brian and Luke from Awesome, Inc., in Lexington who put together a pilot mobile event last year that produce some awesome learning and thinking. I toured Awesome, Inc., with Luke in April of last year.

The events are one-day mind-blowing learning sessions, collaborations and even contests. You get to learn, but you get to do as well. Plus you meet some talent folks to perhaps partner with down the road. For more on their pilot event, check out the recaps on the Awesome, Inc., site.

To learn more about the lineups for each of the upcoming events check out the agendas and speakers for:

• Columbus
• Chicago
• Atlanta
• Nashville
• Lexington

On each site’s page you can register to attend. Early bird pricing is only $60!

And my boys hooked me up with a little discount code, too. So when prompted drop in “ainc10″ for a 10% off deal. I don’t get anything from the sales of the tickets, but have told Brian and Luke I’ll gladly tell people about the events. I think they’re going to tell people I’m a sponsor in return, but no money is exchanging hands here. I’d recommend MobileX even if I got no benefit out of it because I think mobile is next and the collaborative nature of these events makes them invaluable.

Now it’s your turn. What do you think is next in social media? Is mobile it or is it something else? As always, the comments are yours.

You could say the social media monitoring industry has been the single fastest-growing niche in the world of technology over the past three years. As more companies engage in social media, participate in conversations and launch social media initiatives, the demand to monitor what is being said and analyze that data is critical for companies to not only read and react, but also fund and staff social initiatives.

Because social media monitoring has been one of my favorite topics here on Social Media Explorer, I’m asked my opinions of the tools regularly. I try hard to review different ones as often as possible without this becoming a blog about social media monitoring exclusively. But the industry seems to be growing, and becoming more competitive, with each passing day.

As a result, I’ve decided to take a more focused approach to social media monitoring solutions to better understand them myself, offer you insights and analysis of the tools and be better poised to recommend appropriate solutions for my clients. To do so, however, first requires that I understand more about how you are using social media monitoring solutions and what makes a good solution for you and your organization. With that, I ask that you take just a few moments to fill out the survey below. I will readily share the results soon as we explore social media monitoring solutions together.

And before you navigate away, did I miss anything? Are there items relevant to social media monitoring I should be discovering that were not included in the survey. A penny for your thoughts? The comments are yours.