Peter Shankman of Shankman.com and founder of HARO (Help A Reporter Out - a social media PR and marketing company serving reporters, entrepreneurs and small businesses) announced the “dawn of a new HARO” today. The new and improved HARO now allows “Vertical HAROs” - a chance for subscribers to select what topic queries they want to receive. Other new features include advertising via the HARO site (versus directly to Peter) and reporter emails are now masked. Visit HARO and tell us and the HARO team what you think about the new changes.

Are you planning an event this year? Event Coup’s Samuel J. Smith lists 10 ways social media will transform events in 2010. He says, “As attendees become more comfortable with these new two-way communication experiences, they are going to start demanding similar experiences from their face-to-face events.”  Two of the ways he lists include: events will become communities that last for weeks and months rather than a few short days and attendees will want a voice in the discussion, learning and decision making process. Read the rest of the ways social media will transform events  and don’t forget to add your own input.

Meryl K. Evans shares how to make the most of your social media time. According to Meryl, “while social media is [her] primary marketing tool, plenty of others spend more hours social networking than [she] does and for different reasons.” Meryl spends her social media time comprised of a mix of social networking at the same time every day, posting tweets throughout the day using a scheduling application, joining the right Twitter chats, reviewing Facebook updates once a day, updating her LinkedIn status a few times a week, writing at least two blog post entries per week and reading other people’s blogs. How do you spend your social media time? Share your responses at Web Worker Daily.

Mobile applications are on fire, which is why more and more companies should think about mobile marketing. Christina “CK” Kerley of CK’s Blog provides a 10-step starter guide for integrating mobile into the B2b marketing mix slideshow. She says, “Why the marketing crusade? Because business professionals, which are B2Bs’ target audience, not only use mobile devices to stay connected, they rely on them to stay informed and make business decisions when not located at their place of business.” Check out Christina’s starter guide and don’t forget to add your insights about mobile marketing.

1 Good Reason - Social Marketing’s Chris Kieff discusses “Getting” Twitter. Chris explains why some people don’t “Get” Twitter. He attributes the reason to ‘a basic signal to noise ratio problem’. Signals provide useful and meaningful content while noise is useless and empty. Chris’s recommendation to fix this bad signal is for ‘all newbies to follow at least 200-250 people.’ He says, “But if you’re not “Getting Twitter” it’s not because of anything in you, or the people that you follow, it’s most likely just because you’re not following enough of them yet. So give it a shot and try to follow 200 and see what happens.” What do you think of Chris’s Twitter recommendation?

Michael Blankenship of PepperDigital asks, “How will you manage social media customer engagement in 2010?” He lists TweetDeck, Klout, HootSuite and FiltrBox as ‘four of the potential difference makers of 2010 that are worth considering by brand managers and PR agencies for customer communication and engagement’. What tools do you plan to use this year to manage your social media customer engagement?

Dave Fleet of davefleet.com shares his 2010 Social Media Marketing Ecosystem based on a post about the differences between owned media, paid media and earned media by Forrester Research and analyst Sean Corcoran. In his diagrams, Dave provides key elements of each type of media. He also notes “that the different elements work best when we succeed in breaking out of communications silos and integrating our communications strategies.” Read more about Dave’s marketing ecosystem and share your thoughts at his blog.

For the first time in 23 years football fans will not see TV spots of Pepsi during this year’s Super Bowl. Instead, the company decided to spend $20M on a social media program called Pepsi Refresh. Augie Ray lists some of the ramifications and non-ramifications of Pepsi’s new marketing decision including a fight for marketing dollars between traditional (aka TV) and social/interactive tactics. Read more about Pepsi Refresh and Augie’s assessment of the company’s marketing tactic on The Forrester Blog for Interactive Marketing Professionals. What do you think this will mean for marketers in 2010?

Speaking of TV and social media, Tim Difford of The Next Web asks, “Will 2010 be the Year of Social TV?” According to Tim, “Social Media and TV fanatics are ahead of the game right now and bending the rules to their will.  It remains to be seen whether the broadcasters, perhaps spurred on by advertisers eyeing a potentially motivated and engaged audience, will be able to serve up an enticing interactive broadcast experience during the forthcoming year.” Read the examples Tim shares and don’t forget to answer whether or not you think 2010 will be the year of Social TV.

Brian Solis shares results from an updated annual study on the adoption of social media by the Inc. 500 companies. He says, “The essence of the report shares the tools that are carving the evolution of the fittest. At a minimum, Social Media is affecting and shaping the pillars of business.” Results show that 91 percent of companies reporting the incorporation of at least one social media service or tool in 2009. Other results show an impressive drop of 43 percent to 9 percent of Inc. 500 companies not using social media. Check out the rest of the results at Brian Solis.  What are your thoughts about the increase in social media usage by Inc. 500 companies?

Six Pixels of Separation’s Mitch Joel talks about the comments he received from a list he posted of 10 business books people should check out. According to Mitch, the comments stated that these books did not share anything new. Although some books have similar messages, it’s never too late to learn something new from these books. Mitch says, “This channel [social media] is new, and most books on the subject are giving their own unique perspective and, ultimately, what’s old to you in this space, is brand spanking new to the rest of the global population.” He also asks, “What do you think? Or has this conversation become old too?” Share your insights at Mitch’s blog.

Tinu Abayomi-Paul shares seven social media tactics for explosive results in your business. Tinu describes an explosive social media campaign as one that “has inherent viral exposure, inspires community driven communication, helps make the web a better place, and even brings joy to people, however fleeting.” Those seven tactics include: hot content, niched network nuances, simplify sharing, consistency, engagement, three-way connection and communication, and the question - what’s in it for all? Read more about the tactics in depth at Free Traffic Tips.

The integration of social media with marketing and communications is becoming common amongst companies. In turn, companies are looking for social media savvy employees.  Scot Herrick of Cube Rules presents five suggestions on how to be a star employee on social media.  Suggestions include finding and using the right social media tool for your work as well as adding to the conversations. Find out the three remaining tactics and add your own at Cube Rules.

Twitter added a new tool last week: Lists. According to Ari Melber, “The new lists enable people to curate and aggregate their own recommendations. Then other users can follow the entire group, or surf a list through a dedicated section of Twitter, which is accessible to people who never even signed up with the service.” Have you created your lists on Twitter? What do you think of this new tool? Share your thoughts on The Nation.

Econsultancy’s Chris Lake shares 35 social media interaction metrics/key performance indicators to help measure engagement. The important aspects of social media are to remember it’s all about engagement, giving the people the right tools and making interaction a game. A few of the 35 KPIs include favorites, groups, tagging and inviting/referring a friend. Read the full list and add to the mix!

With the holiday season quickly approaching, lots of stores, such as Kohls, are preparing to take their social media engagement up a notch.  Natalie Zmuda of AdAge.com reports that Kohls “plans to increase spending in digital and social media by 25% to support an expected 30% increase in online sales.” What other retailers do you know plan to use social media to increase sales for the shopping season?

David Armano provides a forecast of social media with his six trends for 2010. His predictions include social media to look less social, for corporations looking to scale, social business becoming a serious play, an enforcement of social media policy in companies, mobile turning into a social media ‘lifeline and ’sharing no longer means e-mail.’ Do you agree with David? Read more about the trends in depth at Conversation Starter.

Katja at Skimbaco Lifestyle helps Dr. Lindsey of Genesis Today and John Andrews of Collective Bias kick off the Great Idea social media contest, which offers a $10,000 social media consulting contract for the winner. The contest revolves around the idea of community as noted by Katja, “Those bloggers who realize that true concept of social capital and community will be the ones standing in the victory lane.” Read more about the contest at Skimbaco Lifestyle and at GenesisOfAGreatIdea.com.

Diva Marketing Blog’s Toby Bloomberg created a list of “divos” - aka men she’s interviewed, highlighted and/or podcasted on her blog. She says, “I realize recently I’ve never dedicated a post to the “divos” .. the men in my social media world who are just as generous in sharing their knowledge, expertise and support. The list includes Paul Chaney, Geoff Livingston, Shel Israel and more. Visit Toby’s blog for the complete list of social media divos.

Doug Stephen lists the three worst excuses for retailers not using social media. The excuses are companies do not want their employees slacking off or spending most of their day on social networking sites such as Twitter; retailers do not want to know or address negative comments; and most companies give the excuse of planning to engage in social media at a later date. What excuses have you heard from companies? Share your thoughts at Retail Prophet Consulting.

Interested in engaging more on different social media sites? Visit Deon Designs to see the top 100 social media sites by SeoMoz. Top five sites are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, and Digg.

Kevin Burke of Moms Who Blog discussed an interesting piece about Nestle Corporation’s effort to engage in social media and an exclusive invite-only event for certain blogger moms. Nestle Corp. decided to host an event inviting blogger moms and attached a hashtag to amp the event on Twitter. The kicker is the blogger mom community who was not invited to attend the event “hijacked” the hashtag and started boycott discussions against Nestle Corporation. Nestle eventually had their Senior VP respond to the tweets. Lesson: “Twitter democratizes conversations. Nestle admitted to being new to social media, and they got an abrupt first day lesson. By encouraging attending bloggers to tweet with the hashtag #nestlefamily, they opened up the dialog, but they weren’t prepared to participate. The Twitter activity was a clear display of how brands no longer can control the message as they previously perceived that they could.” Do you have any corporate social media debacle stores to tell other than Nestle?

Dell is one of the best companies to use social media. Mary Ellen Slayter published guest a post by Richard Binhammer, senior manager in corporate communications at Dell, regarding the company’s use of social media. According to Richard, “While social media started as a way for Dell to distribute news and special offers, it has evolved into a critical relationship builder, integrated into all business units.” Read more about Dell’s integration of social media with their communications plan as well as three tips for social media integration at SmartBlog on Social Media.

Online shopping - who doesn’t do this? The e-tailing group and PowerReviewers released results on their “Community and Social Media Study.”  The results show that three-quarters of the US Web retails surveyed in August -September 2009 said “they thought brands were accelerating their use of, and commitment to, social media.” Although more than one-half of web retailers use five of the 10 community social media tools, there is still fear about their own competence at using social media and losing control of their brand. Read more about the study results at eMarketer.

After 10 years in the news business and 20 years counseling clients how to stay out of headlines when a crisis strikes, I’ve developed 10 basic rules of crisis management.

1.    Being Unprepared Is No Excuse. My father was an officer of the U.S. Army. Although I was never an active Boy Scout, their motto “Be Prepared” was drilled into my head at an early age. As I’ve toiled in this industry for the past two decades, it has amazed me how many companies are totally unprepared to deal with a real crisis. Most either have a crisis plan that hasn’t seen the light of day for at least a decade, or the plan is so complicated it would require an army of engineers to figure it out. Sorry to say, far too many organizations have found more important items to address, leaving their crisis plans as to-do items until the day the stuff hits the fan. They say it takes a lifetime to build a reputation and only a few seconds to destroy it. You’re almost guaranteed the latter, if you fail to plan. Being unprepared is no excuse; it’s just a reflection of the importance you place on your reputation.

To take a peak at the other nine, click here   

Evan Carmichael shares The Top 50 Social Media Blogs of 2009 on his blog EvanCarmichael.com. He categorized the blogs by social networking, social media & marketing, blogging for business, social media, industry insights social media & PR and social design. Review Evan’s list and suggest some blogs for 2010’s list.

CNN made a huge gaffe as they reported shots being fired on the Potomac River via Twitter. Ian of Ian’s POV discusses how CNN’s report caused a domino effect with outlets such as Reuters and Fox News reporting the news without fact checking. He says, “CNN made a mistake…But it was a mistake other media outlets have made or will make in the rush to be first. How many times have news anchors said: “We can’t confirm this, but we’re going to tell you anyway.” That’s the teaching lesson here for CNN and its peers.” What’s your point-of-view about the CNN blunder?

Twitter is getting everyone in trouble - even President Obama. After Kanye West’s outburst at MTV’s VMA awards about Taylor Swift’s win for Best Female Video of the Year, the media had a field day asking celebrities and even President Obama their insights on the incident. Kevin Eklund of ToMuse reports that one of ABC’s employees overhead the President call Kanye a “jackass” and tweeted the statement, which was supposed to be off the record. What do you think about of reporters and journalists’ using Twitter to share news prematurely or “off the record”?

What is a love brand? The BrandBuilder Blog’s Olivier Blanchard shares the definition of a lovebrand and ‘how to build one.’ Some of the definitions include: ‘It’s about choosing to be better, just because you can… and because you should‘ and ‘It’s about listening to your customers. Not just saying you do, but actually doing it, and proving it by giving them what they want.’ Read more about lovebrands and how to build one at The BrandBuilding Blog.

Lee Aase discusses the Social Media Pyramid, a representation of the four basic social media “food groups” and their suggested “servings and portions.” According to Lee, “In the food pyramid a serving is something you consume. In the Social Media Pyramid a serving is something you produce. It has to be of value to others to qualify. Otherwise it’s a negative. Five good tweets plus two pointless, self-promotional or “spammy” ones gives you a net of three servings, not seven. And some might even say a bad tweet is worth -2.” What do you think of the Social Media Pyramid? Share your thoughts at SMUG - Social Media University, Global.

The Customer Collective’s Augie Ray provides 10 ways to identify trustworthy social media communication professionals. The suggestions for determining a trustworthy social media pro include: are they active and professional participants in social media, the length of experience in the marcomm/PR business, and what their stance is on ethics and laws in social media. Read the remaining seven at The Customer Collective or add your own suggestions.