Every time I walk through the cluttered aisles of the deep discounter Ocean State Job Lot in Rhode Island and see ill-conceived products like green tea soda or Maalox Whip, I smile and think of Bob McGrath.

As a young reporter at UPI, I had the pleasure of spending an afternoon with Bob in his quirky Museum of Failed Products, in New York’s Finger Lakes region.  From eggs designed to cook in a toaster to New Coke, the collection of tens of thousands of consumer flops were a reminder that smart business people often make expensive mistakes.

The same thing happens in the B2B world — even on Twitter.

Journalist feed aggregator Muck Rack’s attempt to make money by sending paid content to its own audience of followers may be one such cock-up, though only time will tell.

Despite the fact that the @muckrack Twitter feed has fewer than 3,900 followers, Gregory Galant believes issuers of news releases will be willing to spend $1 per character on the chance that a tweet release will yield some coverage.  The minimum fee is $50 and the max is $130 to use the Muck Rack service, which precedes each paid tweet with the “RELEASE:” disclaimer.

While it’s certainly a wonderful aspiration to think that every journalist whose tweets, retweets and article links show up on Muck Rack will read each mini-release and dutifully click on each miniturized URL, the reality is that most of the followers aren’t even in the media, don’t blog and have only a small number of followers.

A much better approach for issuers with newsworthy items is to use Twitter Search to identify people who write about topics related to your news.  Follow those people.  Comment on their posts.  Build online relationships.  Contribute to the conversation.  That way, when you have news, they’ll find your release interesting and may actually retweet it — free of charge — to their followers.

That’s called earned coverage.  I promise you’ll like it more than green tea soda or Gerber’s failed baby food for adults.