"You get it on Oprah, and you're done," stated Paul Beck, Sr. Partner, Executive Director of Digital, Ogilvy Worldwide at today's OMMA Social conference.

Well then, it's just that easy.

For live reporting from the conference, click here.

PR pros from Google, McDonald's and ConAgra got together yesterday in Chicago to discuss the changing media landscape and how they're dealing with it.

Chicago Tribune tech reporter Eric Benderoff was there to chronicle the discussion.

Many of the usual subjects were covered: increased message testing, engaging consumers, setting up community sites. However this point from McDonald's director of U.S. communications Heather Oldani, in reference to the fast food chain's employee social network, Station M, stood out among the others.

"The goal is not to make this a corporate site," she said. "We want the employees to take ownership." To help, one "crew" member won a contest and has been taken off fryer duty for a year to become the site's official blogger.

From fryer duty to blogger in just one contest - not bad at all. We can imagine that employee comes home from work smelling a lot nicer.

[Image: Rick, McDonald's official blogger, is no longer working the deep fryer]

Here is something that may be a common scenario: your client loves the idea of a company blog, they just don't want to write it. Or maybe they'll work with you on writing it, but don't have time to "engage" in the online conversation via comments or other methods.

What is a PR pro to do? Write the blog for them? Hire a writer? PRNewser asked some of the top "new media" communicators in the industry for their take.

What they said may surprise you.

continued...

Everyone is a publisher now, not just media companies. Nothing new there.

But what do people, companies and the media value when they create new blogs, micro-sites, online communities, etc?

Feedback.

Feedback can mean many things, whether it's comments, link love, web traffic, etc. This is valuable, to show that your initiatives have traction or engagement among certain targeted audiences. But what happens when your feedback gets captured only on a "third party" aggregator site?

This happening more and more as discussions occur in places like Friendfeed and not in the places where content orginiates. Union Square Ventures VC Fred Wilson has this to say, "...the people who create social media content; the bloggers, the twitterers, the commenters, the youtubers, the flickrers, etc, etc are doing this for a reason. Feedback. And without their content, none of these companies would have a business."

By "these companies," Wilson is referring to Friendfeed and Twitter, among others. Now, Wilson does have somewhat of a vested interest, given that he has invested in Disqus, the third party comment system, which tracks user's comments across all sites, and would like to see engagement and conversation occur where content originates, and not on aggregator sites.

However he has also invested in Twitter, which he says is, "part of the problem."

What does this have to do with PR, you say? Well, as Chris Anderson told us at the recent Mediabistro Circus conference, "community is easy to say, hard to do."

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Check out the above presentation by Steve Rubel, SVP of Edelman, Micropersuasion blogger, and director of Edelman Digital's Insights. It's a very similar presentation to what he just gave at the mediabistro.com Circus event this afternoon.

Rubel lead off explaining "I have the best job in the world. My job is to study the Internet, and try every social network out there".

He told the crowd to keep an eye on emerging trends--or "faint signals"--and place marketing bets on them. Two mentioned included the "living room 2.0" (social networking integrated in to your home), and "digital nomads," content creators and bloggers who are guided and inspired by the Book of Ferris.

After Chris Anderson's keynote at the mediabistro.com Circus, I caught up with him for an exclusive video interview on some of the aspects of his talk and how they relate to the PR industry.

I'm particularly interested in how the value of secrecy in PR for corporations increases as information wants to be free, open-sourced, and generated by consumers. I used Apple as an example.

Ironically, Anderson did seem tempted during his keynote to reveal news about the magazine's social networking efforts but had to keep quiet for now.

Also watch the above for some encouraging comments on how PR people can get involved in storytelling in these emerging networks. He doesn't hate all PR people, just the ones on his list, so far.

Have you launched a blog for a client? Worked with a media company on a blog or other social media features? Chances are, implementing comments has brought the most amount of "fear" to the project.

Here at the mediabistro Circus conference, the question was asked of Paul Rossi, publisher of The Economist. How do they deal with comments? Do they have a specific editor who reviews them all?

Paul responded, "There is a very light editorial touch. They are all looked at manually. It would be something quite obvious we would take off. Traditionally in print the letters get printed once a week, we now put every single letter sent to us online. Online journalists are very exposed to what people are saying about them."

Elaborating on The Economist's take on blogs, Rossi said, "Blogging may not be the best model for The Economist. There are some inherent issues with a business publication bogging. When we talk to our audience, the terminology of blogging is unappealing. When you ask a business audience if they read blogs, they say no."

We don't know social media strategist and Podcamp founder Chris Brogan, per se, but we do follow his blog from time to time.

And today, we came across a particularly interesting (and funny) post (thanks Brian Solis!)about a PR pitch he received. The pitch came from CellSpin, asking Chris to embargo news until 9AM ET tomorrow.

Well it certainly rubbed him the wrong way, and he included in his response one of the best one liners we've seen recently: "It's about getting to know me before you fart in my face."

To be sure, we here at PRNewser won't claim innocence from never having farted in one's face, however do try and avoid it at all costs.

Truth is, it's impossible to get to know every reporter, but that is not the only point. As Chris states, "Please at least PRETEND you know me, give a rat's ass about me, read my stupid little blog. Don't just lob something over the wall at me. Because hey, I'm doing something over here, and I'm actually reaching out to potential people in your space..."

Now we're not advocating being fake to people, but someting simple like, "Hey, I saw your post on this, and I thought you'd be interested in my client, who does this," will go a long way into making your pitch stand out.

Marketing Guru Steve Rubel Talks with Brian About Info Overload from Brian Lehrer Live on Vimeo.

Edelman's Steve Rubel was recently on the Brian Lehrer show, talking about "marketing pollution" among other topics.

A choice exchange towards the beginning of the interview:

Lehrer: You're saying that the internet itself is polluted.

Rubel: I think so. To a large degree. Because I think what ends up happening is a lot of marketers are going at it the wrong way. And they're just, you know, they're viewing it as a communications vehicle only, and they're blasting their messages out there. There are people who are doing it in a, there are some people who do it in a very correct way, in a polite way, in an inviting way, and then there's people who of course are spammers, and you know, people who put spy-ware on your computer, who do it in a totally different way. But, you know...very few marketers are being inviting and kind of saying 'come and have a conversation with us,' so that we can kind of work towards a shared outcome. And I think we're going to see more marketers do that. It makes marketing more meaningful as opposed to just being a pitch.

Lehrer: But you're working for a marketing firm, a public relations firm.

Rubel: I am.

Lehrer: Criticizing the way marketers are using the web?

Rubel: Yup, as of today.

When asked for an example of marketers doing things the right way, and having a conversation, Rubel cites MyStarbucksIdea.com, the social media site created for Starbucks by Edelman (he did disclose the relationship on the show).

(image cred)

I really hope not. But lately, it seems like it is a reasonable possibility. For one thing, Robert Scoble speaking at the Bulldog Reporter Media Relations conference last week did not help. According to Sally Falkow, about 75% in the audience for Scoble's keynote had not ever seen Twitter. That's not surprising, or unexpected, or bad, really. It's not for everyone.

Meanwhile, Scoble timed this announcement, via Twitter of course, in conjunction with his appearance at the conference: "Anyone who joins Twitter after today is not an early adopter. So, not interesting for me to follow."

Some are pondering the recent spike in users or followers. Others, such as Adam Ostrow at Mashable have gone so far to say, "Twitter Spam Spirals Out of Control."

I've seen a few updates to my Twitter followers since the Media Relations conference, but they've all been people I know or have worked with, so nothing too out of the blue there.

However, given the hype recently, I wonder how much Twitter will be picked up more by the "non-tech geek" types and if so, what that will mean for the medium. (Caveat: it's not only for the geeks.)

I do find Twitter very useful. I am able to connect with other bloggers, journalists, co-workers, and PR people, while sending and receiving more useful information than potentially with any other medium. However, the minute Twitter becomes a flood of "read my post" or "check out this link" spam, which is already happening to a certain extent, is the minute the crowd will move on.

That's not to say it's never ok to plug a link, but if you only ever plug your links, you're not adding anything.

What do you think? Will Twitter be changed by a flood of PR?