For example, while preparing to launch Schwinn’s new Tailwind electric bicycle at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show, we used Twitter to find and identify journalists at a number of media outlets who

A)   Planned to attend CES, and

B)   Were looking for new green and clean tech story ideas.

This effort alone landed us stories with CNET, MSN, and DVICE.com, just to name a few.

In other words, use Twitter (and other social networking platforms) to find and identify journalists who might be interested in your company, products and/or services.

Sometimes, however, the best thing for a PR professional to do is to pick-up the phone and call that reporter.

It’s not something I recommend all of the time. But on occasion, making a phone call is the easiest (and fastest) way to learn exactly what you need to know and communicate exactly what you need to communicate.

You can call it Web 2.0 or the Next Generation Internet; I don’t really care.

But you need to use social media and/or social networking tools, services and platforms in your public relations, marketing communications and investor relations efforts. (And that means both for your company/clients, as well as for you personally.)

We recommend you do the following:

1. Create one or more public profiles on the Internet (Facebook, LinkedIn and Plaxo are the best),
2. Begin using a microblogging service (Twitter is our tool of choice),
3. Start taking and putting digital photos in photo-sharing sites (Flickr and Photobucket work well for this), and
4. Start shooting and sharing videos in online video-sharing sites (YouTube’s the huge leader here, but there are hundreds of video-sharing sites on the Internet to choose from).

At a minimum, using social media/networking platforms, tools and services will boost your visibility on the Internet. More likely, you will also

• increase your credibility,
• sell more products and services, and/or
• land more clients and customers.