Riders of elevators in New York City office buildings know what topics are trending on Twitter even before they fire up their computers each morning.

As legions of office workers scurry to their desks, the data they’re seeing on the Captivate elevator ad network is the same information driving editorial and sales decisions at a new consumer-driven online news network with a familiar name.

AOL is relaunching in December as an marketing-supported provider of original content in dozens of consumer and business markets. Unlike news products from Google and Yahoo, AOL is not simply aggregating articles from other news sites.

CEO Tim Armstrong plans to direct his growing team of employees and freelancers to write copy and create multimedia content based on what topics are drawing the largest amount of consumer attention at any given time. To hell with long tail, this play aims clearly at the head of the beast.

If executed well, Armstrong’s model will be appealing to brands that want their people, products and ideas to be included in relevant online content in real-time. The payback comes when the brands sponsoring timely articles and multimedia packages see better performance than current online advertising. The blowback, however, could happen if a brand’s desire to use the platform as an advertorial vehicle is not tempered effectively.

Advertorials and contextual adverising are not new business concepts. But uneasiness about polluting editorial content with paid information has kept them from scaling, beyond CNBC’s “Business of Innovation“ sponsored profile on IBM and a few similar efforts.

For decades in the news business, PR people and marketers have done the best they could to anticipate when topics will flare up in the media. At United Press International, where I cut my journalistic teeth, and later at PR Newswire, legendary features editor Fred Ferguson’s annual calendar (PDF) of “special sections” guided us to gather content just ahead of events and holidays.

Likewise, publishers prepare editorial calendars to make sure there’s ample bridal content to surround the inevitable bridal advertising that characterizes wedding-planning season, or Mother’s Day stories for late April. 

That long-lead material will be easy for Armstrong’s team to produce, with or without the sophisticated web-consumption algorithms and freelancer assignment site that are the secret sauce for the new AOL.

But it’s much harder to quickly build out credible, sponsored content around timely topics that could not be easily forecasted.

When Kanye West dissed Taylor Swift during the MTV Video Music Awards, it meant a glut of searches about the teenage crossover star and the rapper who loves Beyoncé. Social media chatter about the episode hockey-sticked first, followed quickly by entertainment news sites and mainstream broadcast and print media.

Some “breaking news” can be pre-packaged. There’s going to be two feet of snow in Buffalo any day now, so why not hit up Goodyear for a sidebar on snow tires?  Likewise, food poisoning outbreaks are happening like clockwork these days, so Seattle attorney Bill Marler has developed a formula for getting his name into the hands of media and victims’ families within hours.

If AOL can systemetize and monetize this “PounceNow” approach to marketing, it will become a welcome source of income for writers, photographers and videographers displaced in the old media Armageddon.  They’d welcome hearing the familiar AOL voice over their computer speakers saying, “You’ve Been Hired.”

Most corporate communicators would steer clear of a news event involving charged racial tensions and the police.

But President Obama’s use of a “beer summit” to calm the war of words between Harvard University scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cambridge, Mass., police Sgt. James Crowley opened the door slightly for gutsy PR pros who might want to latch onto the wave of media coverage surrounding the issue.

The new owners of my hometown beer, Genesee, in Rochester, NY, timed their pitch to perfectly, landing a nice item in Jennifer Rossa’s Private Equity Beat Wall Street Journal blog and a bunch of other TV, radio, newspaper and social media coverage.  Genesee brewed up a controversy over Obama’s choice of Bud Light as the beer he will be drinking tonight.  Bud’s parent, Anheuser-Busch InBev NV, is based in Belgium.

“We think it’s great that the President is getting together over beers to have an important discussion. A lot of good solutions have surfaced when people can relax and talk over a couple cold ones,” said Rich Lozyniak, CEO of The Genesee Brewing Company. “We just hope the next time the President has a beer, he chooses an American beer, made by American workers, at an American-owned brewery like Genesee.”

The lesson here is that every big news story — in social media as well as mainstream print and broadcast — creates demand for sidebar material.  Cheers to the Genesee beer team for understanding the news cycle and pouncing.

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.

Jay Richardson views The Big Bopper

Chantilly means something different to just about everyone. To my wife, a talented baker, it’s the whipped Chantilly cream she serves atop her pecan pie. Those who rely on Pepperidge Farm to cook up their desserts will know the Chantilly brand of raspberry cookie.

Then there’s the French city of Chantilly, a section of Fairfax County, Virginia, named Chantilly, and even a small neighborhood bearing that name in the city of Charlotte, N.C.

The strongest imagery for me involves The Big Bopper’s 1958 rock and roll hit Chantilly Lace, which has since been covered by dozens of bands. The opening line, “Hello, baby!” is arguably one of the most recognizable lines in rock.

The Big Bopper, aka Jiles Perry Richardson Jr., and two other young pop superstars, Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens, were killed in a plane crash on February 3, 1959, an event memorialized as “the day the music died” in Don McLean’s balled American Pie.

Leaping ahead nearly 50 years, a marketer with the appetite for publicity and the stomach for controversy has the opportunity to become a hero to The Big Bopper’s son, Jay Richardson, and the sponsor of a rock concert to keep his dad’s musical memory alive.

What’s the catch? Only the fact that Jay Richardson has decided the only way to fund his dream is to sell The Big Bopper’s used coffin. And he plans to do it via an eBay auction.

Jay Richardson, 49, has owned the 16-gauge steel casket since last year, when it was exhumed from Forest Lawn Cemetery in Beaumont, Texas, which just erected a large statue and memorial to the Big Bopper. The re-interment into a new casket gave the funeral industry a chance to test the quality of their circa-1950s product which, upon close inspection, stood up to 49 years of muddy entombment with only minor rust spots and lime stains.

Inside, as chronicled by Ron Franscell of the Beaumont Enterprise, “forensic examiners found the Big Bopper’s well-preserved corpse, dressed in a black suit and a blue-and-gray striped tie. He wore socks, but no shoes. Most remarkably, his thick brown hair was still perfectly coiffed in his familiar, 1950s flat-top.”
eBay has been a remarkable vehicle for marketers to acquire the oddest objects, along with plenty of media attention and the associated surge in web traffic:

– Goldenpalace.com, an online casino, paid $28,000 for a partially eaten grilled cheese sandwich auctioned by a woman who claimed an image of the Virgin Mary suddenly appeared on her lunch. In 2006, actor William Shatner sold his kidney stone to GoldenPalace.com during an auction that helped victims of Hurricane Katrina.

– Dr. Pepper Snapple Group earned an avalanche of positive media coverage, including NBC’s Today Show, this past June when it heard a Virginia hairdresser was trying to fund her wedding by auctioning off a bridesmaid spot on eBay. The beverage company and its agency, Ketchum, spent $10,000 and could very well send a celebrity bridesmaid to the April 19, 2009, nuptials.

Will a rusted casket that for nearly 50 years held the remains of The Big Bopper find a home with a familiar brand?  I’m dying to know.