Twitter has obviously been a hot topic of conversation over the past year or so and seems to be steadily growing in prominence.  In fact, we even rolled out a feature in January called TweetIt that makes it easier for our customers to blog about their news.  My own personal indicator is that many of my friends who work in non-online industries have joined Twitter and begun to ‘Tweet’, which has lead me to think more seriously about the service.

Last April, Silicon Alley Insider reported that Twitter was seeking Series C funding and its valuation ranged between $60 million and $150 million, which certainly seems interesting to me given that absence of a top line.  However, the obvious valuation is in the ad worth of Twitter, although more recently co-founder Biz Stone has been talking about charging corporations for commercial accounts.

The inclusion of ads seems a dubious direction.  If they do start injecting ads into the feeds, it seems a matter of time until a differentiated service springs up and a mass user migration takes place a la MySpace to Facebook (albeit I’m sure News Corp still saw a significant ROI on their $500m investment). Even without the injection of ads, it seems a matter of time until the spammers jump on the bandwagon and start diluting whatever value exists in the existing communication.

From my perspective the broader concern is over the qualitative value of communications facilitated through Twitter.  I honestly believe that anything over $30-40m seems a bit high based on my belief that a great deal of the communications happening on Twitter are too glib to have any meaningful impact (although I will admit that there are definitely a handful of people who are leveraging the tool in extremely intelligent ways).

Although I believe it does have value as a tool for B2C communications or influencer-to-consumer communications (I2C communications), the general consumer chatter reminds me a bit of a global chatroom where a majority of people who don’t really know one another exchange very brief remarks without a sustained sense of community.

I believe what is missing here is a broadscale study into the behavioral impact of communications facilitated via Twitter.  I hope whoever is currently speculating a purchase of Twitter is considering this component.

At any rate, I’d be fascinated to hear what other people have to say about the value of Twitter…

It has been over a year since we released PRWeb in Plain English, a short video clip produced by Common Craft that did a great job simply and succinctly explaining how PRWeb works.

For the past several months we have been working on a follow-up that explores the context behind how PRWeb disrupted the newswire industry and created a new model for how news is distributed online, one that is now being emulated by traditional newswires as well as a myriad of start-ups.

With that being said, I hope you enjoy our new video, How PRWeb Changed the Press Release.

There tends to be a good stream of coverage in both traditional and online media of PRWeb however every so often an article comes along that is really worth sharing.  Rae Hoffman, Principal of Sugarrae Consulting, has recently authored a well-written and comprehensive review of PRWeb that is worth a read for anyone interested in a broader understanding of what it is we do and what we offer.

From the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press:

The internet, which emerged this year as a leading source for campaign news, has now surpassed all other media except television as a main source for national and international news.

The flip-flopping of print and the Internet as the main news source for the broader online population was inevitable given the rapid proliferation of broadband access as well as the vast intrinsic advantages of online versus print.  There is probably a natural inclination to think that the elections had a lot to do with the trend however a quick glance at the top news stories for 2008 indicates that four of the top five stories (followed very closely) had to do with the economy.

I wonder if the urgency that has surrounded the financial crisis was a catalyst for the shift to online from print as more people decided they wanted their information in real-time as opposed to the next morning.

The research does raise some interesting questions such as A) What are the sources that people are turning to online?  Are people just turning to the online version of mainstream publications or are they turning to news aggregators and/or blogs?

This time of the year it seems as though there is an endless array of parties and social gatherings to fill up your evenings.  Some of these gatherings are going to involve your co-workers or friends and family, who you already know and love (or at least can bear).  However, everyone knows what it is like to attend a gathering where you may only know a few people.

In these situations you have several options.

Some people will be a wallflower and sip their drink in the corner or glom on to the one person who they know throughout the night.  There are also those who will go out and try to meet as many people as humanly possible and exchange cards as though they were at ad:tech.  Finally, there are those who will engage with a more limited array of people.

Now consider the process of link building (which is quintessentially a social practice).

Those who take a blitzkrieg approach to fostering social connections are the rote link builders.  At a party they are going to be the people that tell the same story or the same joke and work the room in it’s entirety with little or no regard for the people they are actually interacting with.

From a link-building perspective this would be the people who use boilerplate communication and try to hit as many people as humanly possible (aka the spammers).

Those who are sitting by the wall sipping their drink and watching the party are only slightly better off.  These are the non-link builders who still don’t understand the importance of social engagement in the online world.  They may be the most fascinating person in the world yet may go through the entire evening without engaging in one interaction and at the end of the day they may have even gained less social capital than the spammers.

Finally, there are the balanced socializers – those who truly make an effort to engage with others at the party and ultimately forge meaningful, sustainable relationships based upon their interactions.  They realize the true secret to link building – that it is more about quality than quantity of interaction and that developing a handful of meaningful relationships is far better than developing a copious amount of irrelevant relationships.

Within all this, the role that a newswire plays is to provide you, the attendee at the social gathering, with a platform.  It is as though the host of the party comes by with a microphone and asks you to perform a toast.

The toast is an opportunity to share a little of yourself with the entire room at one time.  It can be a social catalyst if you have something worth sharing (it can also be terribly embarassing if you don’t).

However, the toast is an overture and not the coda.

You give your heart-warming toast that has everyone in the room tearing up.  After you give the toast is when the work actually begins.  The toast has brought you to the the forefront of the party but that doesn’t mean that you have created a sustainable bond with everyone.  People may come up and introduce themselves to you but you still have to interact with them and show them why you are worth creating a sustained bond with.

In the world of news, those people are the bloggers, journalists, consumers and other stakeholders out in the world and ultimately it is those links that are going to have a bearing on your search capital (or your social capital if we’re still in the metaphor).

So to wrap things up in a neat little bow, the news release is a catalyst, not the finality.  Link-building is an ongoing process that requires a dedicated and diligent effort – news releases should play a prominent role in the overall process however their real value is in getting your news in front of the people that matter to your business.

I’ve recently fielded several questions stemming from the article on social networking in the New York Times that came out last week. One in particular caught my attention and I’d like to address it a bit more comprehensively.

The question was from a guy about to launch a Bed & Breakfast in Colorado and was interested in knowing whether social media could be an appropriate marketing tactic to target “people interested in traveling for pleasure and honeymooners.”

There are probably other tactics that might be more effective at driving new customer acquisition at the outset. For instance, there is probably a traditional public relations strategy somewhere in your plan that would look to target domestic travel channels and channels for newlyweds and honeymooners. I would certainly think social media could play an important role in your public relations strategy because I’m sure there are loads of non-traditional media influencers who are worth targeting. In fact, I’d even consider doing an event where you get together a list of key influencers in your space and simply comp. them a weekend. There may be also a SEM strategy that drives customer acquisition in spaces like “bed & breakfast” & Colorado. What’s more, social media can probably be used as a tactic to facilitate this broader SEM strategy.

However, the role I think social media can play outside of PR and SEM for your business is to facilitate engagement between you and the individuals in your personal social network.

First, let me clarify what I mean by ’social network’ because I’m not referring to MySpace or Facebook. The first step is to detach the concept of ’social networking’ from any of the various forms it takes. These are tools that facilitate interactions in real breathing, living social networks however they are not themselves social networks. They can facilitate strong network connections and create weak ones but they aren’t places where true, meaningful interactions take place (in general) and solid network connections grow.

Your social network is the Web of connections you compile over time through meaningful interactions with others. In the case of your business, it will be the customers you acquire and the influencers you come into contact with as the result of your broader marketing efforts.

Your social media strategy should be aimed at facilitating engagement with these people.

Now the nature of who these people are and where they interact is key because knowing this will allow you to match your tools to your network. For us (PRWeb), Twitter is an important tool because the adoption rate of Twitter is high with many of our customers. Through our Twitter account we are able to send out quick, informal announcements to a large segment of our social network. However, my instinct would be that Twitter might not be the best tool to facilitate network connections among travelers and Honeymooners who have visited your B&B in Colorado (at this point in time).

I’ll end with what I believe to be a good example of a brick and mortar that has a social media approach that works well with its business, Barrel Oak Winery in Delaplane, Virginia. Their primary channels used to communicate with their social network include their Web site and e-mail list.

Now, the way social media has played into their overall marketing efforts has been as a component of their PR strategy. Early on, they reached out to various influencers who cover what’s going on in the DC-area (which is how I came into contact with them originally) and invited them to visit their winery. They created strong relationships with these influencers and have gained considerable blogosphere press as a result. One of the keys here is that they understood the underlying importance of forging strong network connections through offline interactions. Since they have forged some strong relationships with local influencers, a next step for them might involve launching a blog that allows them to provide updates to those local influencers who are already part of their social network.

The underlying takeaway from all this is that Barrel Oak didn’t simply launch a blog, Facebook page, etc. They took careful measure of what the existing environment was like and used tools (e-mail / Web site) appropriate for their social network. Social media did play into their overall strategy but more as a component of their PR efforts.

Article from AllBusiness that was syndicated on the New York Times Web site about using social networking sites for Marketing and PR:

Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace have become the party lines of this young century. They are inviting and intriguing and a powerful communication tool. Learning how to use them wisely for marketing can increase your business profile.

Jiyan Wei, product manager at PRWeb, an online press release marketing service, is a fan of social networking sites. He has formed a group on Facebook for PRWeb that includes journalists, bloggers, and others in the media industry who use PRWeb as one of their sources for information. Rather than sending this group traditional, impersonal press releases, he uses it for smaller announcements. “If we’re going to have a booth at a trade show I’ll send out a note to the group and invite them to stop by,” he says. “Often someone will post a casual comment or ask a question. If it’s too long, I take the conversation offline.”

Read the Full Article on NYTimes.com

This morning we announced our new partnership with AOL Money & Finance.  Under the terms of the partnership we’ll be sending them a real-time feed of our private and public company news releases for syndication on the AOL Money & Finance Web site.

The partnership will be rolled out in two phases. In phase 1, public company press releases will be show in the quotes and portfolio sections of AOL M&F.  In phase 2, all of our private and public content will surface through a widget on the main AOL M&F page and through AOL news search.

AOL Money & Finance is one of the leading financial resources on the Web with over 15 million unique visitors each month.  The site delivers various financial tools to members including personalized stock quotes, real-time streaming quotes, and breaking financial news from over 3000 news sources – now including PRWeb.

We’ve been working on some programming on the conference circuit with Webmaster Radio devoted to what’s new with PRWeb.  Here are the links to the episodes we have produced so far:

• 107/2008 – General Update with PRWeb from SMX
• 11/4/2008 – PRWeb Partnership with Entrepreneur from ad:tech

This morning we announced our new online newsroom product, which allows customers to easily create a newsroom that contains their releases, company information, multimedia collateral, etc.  Their newsroom is then hosted on a newsroom directory on our site and linked to from their news releases.

I chatted with John Mulligan of SEO-PR about the new product at SES in New York.