Chocolate’s in the news today.  If Cadbury is gobbled up by Kraft — or Hershey or Nestle for that matter — how would that impact you or your clients?

With gold surpassing the psychological barrier of $1,000 an ounce, eBay reported 14k gold was the “biggest mover” today.   Not surprising, similar action is being seen on Craigslist. Investment advisors and consumer protection agencies should be having a field day.

The United Nations General Assembly is preparing to meet in New York September 15.  If your organization is gathering at the same time, can you draw parallels and attract attention?  Or maybe you have some wonderful gridlock-busting technology you should be showcasing in Manhattan during the mayhem.

Look out Conference Board, The Economist claims its Big Mac Index is an accurate financial indicator?  If you represent a global product or brand (and don’t mind calling attention to market-by-market pricing), challenge the sandwich to a duel.

Friday marks eight years since the attacks by al-Qaeda on New York and Washington. Is there a tasteful angle that points to ways you or your clients are dealing with the memory of the attacks, helping the families of victims or contributing to a safer world?

Red hot on Twitter over the past 48 hours are thousands of postings under the heading “When I was little, I…” Does this data reveal anything useful? Any emblematic kids’ products or insightful parenting authors want to jump on the bandwagon?

September is when thousands of green interns arrive at PR agencies to make a substantive contribution.  Too often, they are told to organize messy stacks of magazines and newspapers or validate media lists — anything to keep them from jeopardizing actual client work.

If you feel like trying something new — even beyond monitoring calls for help via ProfNet and HARO –  challenge your interns to establish a real-time assignment desk of sorts?  Have them monitor what’s happening right now, not events that occurred last month, last week or even during yesterday’s news cycle.

Very few agencies look at early social media indicators to predict what stories will spill over into mainstream media in the coming days or weeks.  Those who do often look only for specific keywords, like their clients’ and competitors’ brands, personnel and hot issues rather than taking a blue-sky approach that invites more creative connections to less obvious events and topics sure to command media attention.

By training the interns — and potentially a more experienced in-house staff of  “war room” news hounds — to use readily available, free Web resources, they can surface trending topics and match them against issues your clients are facing.  Account supervisors and management could hold a huddle each morning or afternoon to review what the interns have discovered.

Key to making this work is understanding the type of expertise you can offer influential bloggers and media covering a given story.  Are there experts within your client’s organization who could be interviewed? Do you have b-roll or digital photos to illustrate a point?  Is there any current research that could be summarized and distributed?

Any smart PR agency pro knows that this kind of approach could backfire if an ill-prepared client expert is powdered up for hastily prepared CNBC interview only to bomb on-camera.  Advance media training and content development are key. So is production and digital warehousing of media assets that can serve as sidebar material to amplify the points you’ll make in writing and on-camera.

Many of us continue operating as though year-old editorial calendars, quarterly account reviews and weekly client-agency conference calls are adequate to maximize opportunities — and minimize risk  — in a new generation where user-generated content contributes to a more fluid and often volatile online presentation of hot topics and news.

The new crop of interns might just teach us all something if given the chance.

Dave Mance, in leather jacket, taught me Hyperlocal before it was an Internet business model

Applying the knowledge absorbed early in life is not always obvious.

Case in point, I was too busy having fun as a 16-year-old DJ at tiny Dansville, NY, radio station WDNY-AM to truly grasp how owner Dave Mance was keeping his overhead low and his customers in sharp focus.

Sure, I knew that the start-up shared office space with local real estate man Tom Wamp, and that I was only making $3 an hour to do weekend air shifts. I also realized that Dave didn’t own many vinyl 45 RPM records, instead relying on oldies he borrowed and copied onto dozens of reel-to-reel audio tapes.

In 1978, I was too young and inexperienced in business to understand that Dave was simply being prudent after spending every last cent for an FCC license, transmitter, antenna, turntables, tape decks, mixing boards and other gear needed to get his station on the air. He was a human chameleon – morning show DJ, newsman, sales manager and bathroom cleaner – and his wife and two others were the only full-time employees.

The penny-pinching aspects of running his tiny broadcast enterprise didn’t damper the staff’s enthusiasm.  We were celebrities as we did live “remotes” from car dealerships and the village’s annual Dogwood Festival.  The lack of a local newspaper allowed us to be the authority on things like obituaries, which were sponsored by the Chamberlain Funeral Home and aired during the noon  news.

The cash flow from WDNY allowed Dave to add an FM station in Dansville, purchase additional radio properties in another remote southern New York community — the Delaware County village of Sidney — and in the city of Watertown, 70 miles north of Syracuse.

I had not seen or spoken with Dave Mance for 30 years when I caught up with him in the picturesque Thousand Islands on Thursday night.  While he had sold most of his radio stations three years ago, his status as a small-market media magnate meant he knew virtually everyone in town and enjoyed prestige, like acting as emcee for the Clayton Antique Boat Show.

Spending an evening with Dave in Alexander Bay brought back happy memories of being a big fish in a small pond.  I also realized the business lessons learned from announcing WDNY’s “McDonald’s Birthday Club” had indeed driven my judgment a decade later at PR Newswire.

Seemingly niche businesses like Dan Forbush’s nerdy academic experts service on CompuServe, ProfNet, were fascinating to me — not because of the size of his pre-Web social network but because of focus, uniqueness and the resulting fanatical loyalty of his customers .  Dan owned a niche in the same way our tiny radio station commanded respect, and a bit of cash, in Dansville. PRN bought ProfNet in 1996.

Even with all of today’s media fragmentation and demographic challenges, Dave’s stations in Dansville and Sidney continue to defy national trends by embracing a business model now known in Internet circles as hyperlocal (see Max Kalehoff’s interesting post on the definition of hyperlocal) Broadcasting play-by-play of local high school hockey and football games might only attract a few hundred listeners and minimal revenue, but the consumer loyalty among players’ families and community leaders is priceless.

The GPS-driven localization applications on my iPhone are doing their best to mimic the successes experienced by small-town media properties.  For these local media disruptors to persevere, their citizen journalist contributors will need to do much more than restaurant and bar reviews.  Yelp, Buzzd,  Prximity and Google Local, we’re waiting for you to show up at the Dogwood Festival and soccer game before we annoint you king of neighborhood media.

Slap a logo on your forehead and practice your elevator pitch.

That message is the shocking reality that hordes of freshly terminated workers are receiving as they show up for their orientation sessions at outplacement firms.

Those executives fortunate enough to have received a company-paid stint at one of these “career management” clinics are finding that having a typo-free resume and knowing how to search Monster.com may not spell success in a market where it is estimated that 9,000 jobs are being lost every day.

The issue of how to repackage a demoralized and shell-shocked job candidate is just now gathering steam. Goldman Sachs economist Ed McKelvey said February 12 that 9 percent unemployment will be a reality before the fourth quarter, and that the jobless rate will be in the double digits in 2010.

The unfortunate reality is that many victims of this cross-industry economic morass are simply handed their final paycheck and told they are finished. Those rewarded with outplacement services at least have an opportunity to commiserate with others suffering the same plight.

In the first 15 minutes of the “buckle your seatbelt” orientation webinar at the Manhattan office of Drake Beam Morris, www.dbm.com, the newly jobless were told about a training session for those who would like to take advantage of their career setback to retire, and another track for entrepreneurs on starting a business.

Those whose stomachs were settled enough to throw themselves back into the workaday world were strongly encouraged to think of themselves as a product in need of packaging, marketing and a sales strategy.

The experienced PR and advertising people in the DBM conference room started shifting uncomfortably in their chairs and fiddling with their Blackberries when they heard marketing expertise was needed. Clearly, they were wrestling with internal demons — like whether to thrust their hands into the air, like Arnold Horshack on Welcome Back Kotter, and offer to craft a multimillion-dollar proposal for people who might be eating dinner at a soup kitchen.

It’s too bad the marketers did not offer some tips for job hunting in a Web 2.0 world. Other than one DBM webinar encouraging the use of LinkedIn, there was zero counseling on the DIY tools being used to make candidates highly visible and desirable to employers.

Short of hiring BBDO Worldwide to build a campaign around you, there are some pretty basic and inexpensive/free steps that I have been sharing with job seekers who are keen to be known as thought leaders in their industry while hunting their next position. Put less emphasis on Latin CV, curriculum vitae, and more on the new reality, candidate visibility .

Rather than chastising executives not to wear jeans, modern career counselors ought to be recommending to execs that they consider burning their ties and becoming Web 2.0 savvy. The candidate who reads the blogs and the Twitter and Facebook feeds of people in their field are going to be vastly smarter than others who rely on stale corporate websites, Hoover’s profiles or boilerplate paragraphs in press releases. For those who don’t know how or why to use Twitter, I’ve been recommending Commoncraft’s excellent video, Twitter in Plain English.

Another wonderful thing about new media is that audiences are more nano-targeted than ever before. Gone are the days when there are blogs and TV shows that simply talk about cooking. Now we’re into low-sodium pescetarian cooking. This specialization means that virtually everyone who is out of work can locate the group talking about there area of expertise and join the conversation. Among the easiest tools for this is http://www.blogsearch.google.com

Those whose insights represent original thinking, and who are comfortable being on stage, might want to go one step further and offer themselves up to the media, organizers of industry conferences and analysts. In the pre-Internet days, barriers to entry for new experts were very high. You needed an expensive PR person to get your name and credentials in front of the assignment editors and other gatekeepers. Not anymore. In the same way Craigslist has made it easy to find a Yiddish-speaking masseuse in Rhode Island, services like PR Newswire’s ProfNet can connect you with reporters who are looking for quotable sources on all kinds of topics. You can see a segment of ProfNet’s media queries via Twitter and can complete an “expert profile” so you are included in a database searched by members of the media. Both services are free. If you want the complete feed of ProfNet’s 150+ daily reporter queries, there is a subscription fee. (Disclosure: I used to be president of PR Newswire and still do some consulting for the organization.) Another service, supported by sponsors rather than subscription fees, features requests for speakers and interviewees, yet some of those requesting experts are far from established, respected venues. Whenever responding to a request for help, do some research on the publication, show or individual that might end up interviewing you, and do some prep work so you can easily stay on point and convey no more than one or two key messages.

None of the above suggestions will earn you immediate income.  But they’ll keep your mind in the game and may unearth some job opportunities that have not yet appeared on Ladders.com or Monster.  There are a couple of organizations that will pay experts for their domain knowledge, but these firms are quite selective of who they add to their so-called councils.

The biggest such operation, Gerson Lehrman, makes its money from hedge fund managers and corporations willing to pay a middleman to arrange access to professionals willing to share their expertise. Job seekers participating in these interviews should make sure they don’t pass along any information that’s the property of their former employer.  A wrong step here could jeopardize a former employee’s severance agreement or, worse, get someone into hot water with the Securities and Exchange Commission if insider information is disclosed.

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