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.

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.

It’s no surprise then that Twitter is attracting the attention of many nonprofit organizations looking for ways to connect with new supporters and engage constituents...Twitter, like any strong social network, provides a way for your content to spread organically between people. It helps your organization be more accessible to your constituents, building the trust and strengthening the relationships that earn you strong activists and donors.

It can be hard to decipher what is and what isn’t worth an investment of time and money. Add to that the challenge of successfully upgrading or integrating your Web site to take advantage of these new communications tools.

In short, there is a lot of information with funny little cute names that you’ve never heard before to sort through and get your head around.

Twitter is now the third most popular social network, behind Facebook and MySpace (Compete, 2009). A year ago, it has over a million users and 200,000 active monthly users sending over 3 million updates per day (TechCrunch, 2008). Those figures have almost certainly increased since then. With the torrential streams of Twitter updates (or tweets), there’s an emerging demand to sieve signals from noises and harvest useful information.

Just getting started. Here's a great 3 minute video introduction to blogs - how they work and why they are such a big deal.

...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.