Final results of a 2010 Social Media News Survey conducted by TEKGROUP International and Associate Professor Ken Payne of Western Kentuckuy University seem to underscore the importance of the online newsroom to corporate communicators and amplify the need for a comprehensive social media news strategy when targeting or influencing key constituents in the social media space.

Any media outreach effort must have a compelling and media-friendly press kit. The kit’s purpose is to provide basic information that will invite stories or at least further inquiries. A well-done kit signals a level of seriousness that reporters understand immediately. It should be simple, clear, and not too showy, drawing attention to your main messages and themes. It should offer only basic background data, not every available bit of information. The idea is to create interest, not to exhaust it.

Many reporters now use Twitter as both a place to look for sources as well as an outlet to publicize their stories. Blogger Alice M. Fisher shares several resources and tools for reseraching the reporters and bloggers who are the most important to your organization’s work and for compiling a Twitter list of media contacts whom you want to follow or target for story ideas, complete with their titles, media outlets, and usernames. Click here to visit Fisher’s post.

This article provides a great source of ideas for communicators in addressing the challenges of promoting ideas and causes in a press environment upended by technological and social change and hoping to answer the big question: what does the slow death of free media mean to communicators? 

Five Key Ways to Distribute Your News

(Blogs and Blogger Relations Chapter from Online Politics 101 - Download below)

Blogs, one-time sweet darlings of the political internet world. I can still remember the first time I figured out what a blog WAS, back in the spring of 2003 (I was at South by Southwest, listening to a presentation and no doubt recovering from a hangover).

...The new media landscape calls for new tactics and approaches to be added into the PR practitioner’s toolbox. Vocus spoke with four of the top blogging experts in the industry to get their insights on how today’s PR professionals can successfully incorporate blogger relations into their PR strategy.

Five Key Ways to Distribute Your News

Seven Success Strategies for Pitching to Bloggers

(Chicago--November 17, 2006) Pitching a story to a blogger on the Internet is a different animal than pitching to a print or broadcast reporter. Unlike the "traditional" media world, on the blogosphere you don't get to leverage your verbal agility to establish a relationship with a reporter over the phone first, and then ask if they'd like to see your press release. And you certainly can't spam World Wide Web bloggers with a single, impersonal press release that you've already emailed to the whole wide world.