The result? I rarely checked my feeds. What was meant to save me time ended up creating drastic information overload.

The nasty side effect of this was that I wasn't keeping up with online conversations as well as I like. To me, online conversations are very important. They're the lifeblood of my networking, R&D, and marketing. They're also important to my personal life.

So I took the drastic step of reorganizing my feeds by task, switching to a new feed reader, and dumping about 80% of my feed subscriptions.

And I'm so much happier! Especially because I once again am comfortably in the flow of conversations that intrigue and inspire me. Also, it's now so much easier to follow and participate in conversations on behalf of my clients.

So here's the quick version of how I did it…

Using public relations is a critical tactic in generating awareness for many businesses, and online businesses should be no different. The irony is traditional PR tactics (media relations, ed cal tracking, by-lined articles, speaking opportunities) to drive awareness in the main stream media (MSM), are as foreign to an online business as RSS feeds and blogs are to a majority of offline businesses.

Steven Van Yoder’s recent post titled “Why Online Businesses Should Embrace PR” provides excellent insights to using PR to drive traffic.

To quote Steven, “They read newspapers, magazines and listen to the radio. To reach your market niche comprehensively, you need to explore ways to reach your prospects beyond the Internet. It will help you drive traffic to your web site.”

We agree. Our experience has been that offline MSM coverage drives a tremendous amount of traffic to a company’s website. We know this because we work with PR teams to help them avoid The Placement Crash typically associated with MSM coverage driving new visitors to a dull and non-engaging website.

The magic happens when the PR team is able to work with the online team in delivering a unique and fresh conversational experience to those new visitors.

Don’t waste the amazing opportunity media coverage gives you. Capture the conversation by:

• Extrapolating the salient points in the MSM coverage on your blog and continuing the conversation by posting and responding to comments
• Setting up a teleconference on the coverage topic a week out and provide the ability to register for free online
• Get them to sign up for your email newsletter
• Provide an in-depth article on the coverage topic available for download

Because of the nature of online businesses, it is my honest opinion they are more apt to capitalize on the MSM exposure than many traditional offline business. The reason – they have the technical skills and flexibility to update and use social media and online technologies (blogs, podcasts, email newsletters) to capture the conversation that are often beyond the scope of knowledge for most companies.

For more information on strategies for leveraging the synergies between online and offline media tactics, check out our posts on The Placement Crash and Tried and True PR Tactics for Igniting Online Buzz.

What I want to discuss are two techniques on how you can be the online BUZZ STARTER that everyone else is commenting and creating trackbacks on.

Having completely transitioned to online communications and social media, I brought along some tried and true PR tactics that can be applied to capturing the online conversations. As a matter of fact a few basic block and tackle PR tactics are some of the most powerful ways to be the BUZZ STARTER.

#1. Editorial Calendar Tracking
As much as those of us in the social media world want to lay claim to starting and generating the conversational trends, the fact of the matter is that traditional main stream media (MSM) continues to have a huge influence on conversational topics. The beauty of the MSM is that they are an advertising driven revenue model, so they must publish editorial calendars about subject topics in upcoming issues in order to secure ad sponsorship. Often times editorial calendars are published a year in advance. These calendars are your ticket to being a Buzz Starter. Go get the editorial calendars from your industry trade publications and find out what they are planning to publish in print and start blogging and writing articles for online syndication a month or two in advance of the publication issue.This gives the search engines the time to index your content giving you high visibility for the topic once the publication hits the street.

#2. Industry Conferences
The survival of great industry conferences depends on the quality of the speakers and the relevance of the topics to the attendees. Just like editorial calendars, conferences are planned well in advance, and conference organizers will put out a call for speakers based on subject matter they have identified as being timely and relevant to the audience. By looking at the speaking tracks you can identify subject trends that people will be seeking additional information and knowledge on. If you are subject expert on one of those trends, then start creating and syndicating content a month or two prior to the event. Find out who’s speaking and engage in a conversation with them either via personal email, or posting comments and trackbacks on their respective blogs.

Okay, so the obvious strategy here is to also be in the stories presented in the editorial calendars and be the speaker at the industry conference. I’ll go over that strategy in an upcoming post.

As the popularity of online video grows, you can expect truckloads of advertising dollars to come rolling in. Online video is arguably the most compelling medium for advertisers and as always the challenge will be targeting the right audience and alignment with appropriate content. Advertisers will also be challenged with thinking of crafty new ways incorporate product placement and promotional campaigns into user generated content.

As high speed broadband becomes more standard and the quantity/quality of content improves, the line between my TV box and computer monitor will definitely continue to blur.

1: Researching a Sector’s Link-Worthiness
2: Discovery of ‘Big’ Players in Your Field — do a search at Technorati with your keywords.
3: Targeting YDDS (Yahoo!, Digg, Del.icio.us/Popular, Slashdot)
4: Targeting Offline Media
5: Selecting a Content Focus
6: Melding Branding & Viral Elements
7: Targeting Keywords/Search Traffic
8: Look at Examples of ‘Brilliants Ideas’
9: The Value of a ‘Web 2.0′ Look & Feel – “The look and feel oftentimes is critical.”
10: Elements that Encourage Linking
11: Pre-Launch Public Relations
12: Managing Launch Traffic – “Be careful not to be suckered into a debate you don’t really need to be part of.”
13: Continuing to Get Value from Linkbait -”Update it with timely information.”

Through viral marketing you can take advantage of the network effect of the internet and utilize online word-of-mouth in existing social networks (Digg.com, Del.icio.us). The goal of viral marketing is to increase brand awareness or generate buzz through online word-of-mouth (blogs) which is much cheaper and perceived as more credible than traditional advertising methods.

One recent example of how viral the blogosphere has become is the wildly popular, yet unreleased, movie Snakes on a Plane. In part due to the absurdly appealing title and ridiculous plot line, Snakes on a Plane has generated unprecedented internet buzz mainly through blogs. New Line Cinema even ordered a re-shoot to add scenes based on fan suggestions and an internet trailer spoof – user generated content has made its way to the big screen.

Check out our online video tutorials for more information on how to track your brand and the conversation surrounding it through resources such as Newsgator, Technorati and Del.icio.us.

I’ve been talking to people about companies like Umbria for several months now, all in the spirit of using tools that collect the kind of data that can help predict the future (as opposed to simply summarizing the past). Now, we are beginning to see this topic talked about more in main-stream news circles. If this isn’t the future of Marketing, I don’t know what is.