There’s something special about a guy who isn’t a rock star yet has three times the Twitter followers of Bob Dylan.  He’s not a deep-pocketed electronics retailer, yet his social media presence dwarfs Best Buy.

Jeremiah Owyang is an influencer in Web strategy, a futurist, a gadfly and — most important of all — someone who listens, studies, engages and shares.  A partner in the newly formed consulting firm Altimeter Group, Owyang earned his nearly 60,000 followers the hard way.

Since I dived into the social web after leaving PR Newswire, I found that Owyang’s Forrester research reports provided a well-grounded reality check that validated fundamental shifts in consumer behavior, marketing methodologies and the demand for new PR and marcom tools.  He’s routinely quoted by CMOs during conferences and, unlike many celebrities, @jowyang almost always tweets back immediately.

During my recent visit to Altimeter Group’s new headquarters in San Mateo, California, Owyang showed no signs of being jet-lagged, despite returning less than a day earlier from one of his frequent overseas speeches.  He also demonstrated keen knowledge of an increasingly confusing vendor community supplying social media monitoring, analysis and curation tools.

To illustrate why the public relations industry should familiarize itself with social customer relationship management systems, Owyang shared an anecdote about how appliance maker Whirlpool  failed to appease a disgruntled customer, and the damage it caused due to that customer’s ability to influence millions through social media.

“Customers do not care what department you’re in,” said Owyang, predicting that some forward-thinking companies will take on the challenge of building smart systems that inform Support, PR, Marketing, Product Development and offer a single view of the customer no matter where they touch the company.

I am aware of one large food manufacturer whose PR department is heading into the new year with amped up monitoring capabilities and a plan to pipe real-time data into their customer service call centers.  If the readers of PounceNow are aware of organizations where PR is embracing the challenge, please comment on this post.

Most Americans associate summer’s three-day bank holidays with barbecues, trips to the beach and  family vacations.

I think of corpses.

Not that I am morbid or have a desire to work as an undertaker.  I simply had a recurring assignment early in my journalistic career to keep track of fatal car accidents on New York state highways each Memorial Day, Independence Day and Labor Day weekend.  And I had fun doing it.

Working out of United Press International bureaus in Rochester and Buffalo in the 1980s, I was the only staffer on duty  between New York City and Cleveland Sunday mornings.  My task was to scan newspapers and check in with UPI’s stringer network — friendly news people at local TV and radio stations  across the Empire State — for the day’s top stories.   UPI paid $40 per story, though the company’s numerous bankrupcty filings made the promise of receiving a non-rubber stringer check a running joke.

On the long  holiday weekends, UPI’s state and national wires  kept a tally of the number of people killed in auto wrecks.  We called this the CAX count, an acronym that meant something like car accidents or casualties.   The National Safety Council, an advocate for seatbelt use, would make a prediction about how many unfortunate drivers, passengers and pedestrians would expire between midnight Friday and the end of travel period on Monday.

Vincent Toffany, who headed the safety council, understood that the news cycle was typically very slow on these weekends.  His organization received branding and reinforcement of their messaging.  The American Automobile Association used this release-news-when-it’s dead approach, too, as did gasoline price survey author Trilby Lundberg.

What used to infuriate UPI’s archrival, The Associated Press, is when our prowess on the telephones with state police or stringers would yield an extra victim or two.  In some cases, UPI would be a tad liberal by counting a drunk who died by falling off a highway overpass or the victim of a pre-holiday crash who succumbed after the clock struck midnight.  AP usually relied on “electronic carbon” stories from its member newspapers, which meant AP broadcast subscribers in New York got late, stale news.

In any event, the UPI totals got a helluva lot more airtime and print coverage because I had a higher CAX count every time.

With UPI a shell of its old self — it’s now owned by Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church and its News World Corporation, publisher of the Washington Times — and Reuters and Bloomberg doing a nice job with international and business news, there’s little traditional wire service competition for AP in the United States.  But demand for content among local print and broadcast outlets is down, too, as they lose audience and advertisers to an increasingly fragmented online media landscape.

The Associated Press still makes a significant amount of money off its 50 state reports, thanks to correspondents covering legislative news in statehouse bureaus and a policy not to display the content online, where it could be pirated.  But a reduction in the size of AP’s editorial staff and similar news cutbacks among media outlets that used to feed items to AP, has left huge holes in coverage.

What’s filling the gap? Regional newspapers are banding together to form cooperatives that may make even AP state reports unnecessary in the years ahead.  The Ohio News Organization is one such effort.   Politico also represents a significant threat, as it readily barters editorial coverage of Washington news for advertising inventory in local media outlets and web sites.

There are also some dark horses in coverage of the nuts-and-bolts local news.  Atlanta-based CNN has its own editorial staff plus a large network of domestic radio and television affiliates that both broadcast content from and contribute news to CNN.  The so-called CNN Wire has not yet become a comprehensive state-level news service, but it could.

Not surprisingly, newcomers without legacy business hindrances seem to be doing a fine job breaking news locally and globally.   The micro-local Watertown, NY, site Newzjunky is kicking the digital ass of the century-old Watertown Daily Times and making money by selling advertising.

Twitter is the no-cost platform through which the Dutch news service Breaking News Online reaches the majority of its 1.1 million followers, though it is also emailing and using RSS.  In a short time, BNO has gone from solely aggregating third-party news content in under 140 characters to a growing amount of original reporting.  While there’s no apparent revenue model, it wouldn’t surprise me to see local, state, national and vertical beats pop up under the BNO brand as consumers get hooked on digesting tweets and SMS headlines.

The word “wire” is less about a strand of copper these days.  I think of it as an acronym — World Instantly Reached Electronically — and relish the fact that so many content producers are joining in the fun.

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.

Graphic from Time

Pfizer’s Twitter feed seems to be benefiting from the same ingredient that powers its blockbuster erectile drug.

After only six days @pfizer_news had jumped to 631 followers by 8 o’clock this morning.

Kudos to communications SVP Sally Sussman and global media VP Ray Kerins for prevailing in a heavily regulated industry whose litigation-wary greybeards are notoriously conservative when it comes to social media.

Pharma lawyers have argued that any communications through channels feeding directly to patients — without the traditional bureaucratic review of copy, photos, video and other content — could go south quickly.

“What if” scenarios abound.  In a litigious world where the prescribing information required by regulators is often the size of an encylopedia, it’s easy to see a plaintiff complaining that he or she notified a drugmaker about an adverse reaction via Twitter but got no reply only to suffer….

For those and many other reasons, pharma has arrived later to the Twitter party than many other consumer-facing brands.  Those brave enough to tweet about remedies, clinical trials and medical conferences have taken markedly different approaches.

The most conversational pharmatweep this far is Johnson & Johnson’s Marc Monseau, who is followed by 1,745 and follows 1,096.  He has updated 316 times since launching the @JNJComm feed to supplement the New Jersey firm’s two-year-old “JNJ BTW” blog.

Novartis, based in Switzerland, has published 86 updates on its @novartis Twitter feed since November.  Unlike Monseau, there’s no named personality behind the tweets,  which are mainly 140-character teasers of releases on the Novartis media web site and some occasional industry news.  The lack of interaction is stark — with the company following only 10 on Twitter despite attracting an audience of 2,328.

Germany’s Boehringer was lauded by Jim Edwards on the life sciences news site BioValley Basel for allowing its Twitter personality — 2,178 followers and following 1,657 — to “engage in some harmless banter” rather than toeing the corporate line.

Merck seems to be using the Twitter community only as a recruiting tool, but I question how many Twitter users want to work for a company that’s afraid to engage in a more meaningful way.

In New York, Pfizer’s new Twitter staffers were quick to reply today when I sent a direct message to ask why there were a separate @pfizer (”it’s not Pfizer and not official”) and @pfizer_news Twitter pages.  That kind of willingness to snap quick replies to customers, media and others can only help build trust and goodwill with everyone except the legal department.

A billing mistake resulted in Josh Muszynski’s debit card being charged more than 23 quadrillion dollars for the pack of cigarettes he bought at a Manchester, NH, gas station.  The error was compounded by a $15 penalty for overdrawing his account.

Even though the episode played out in the media — including local broadcast and print outlets and an AP story — it did not snowball into a reputational disaster for Muszynski’s debit card issuer, Bank of America, or Visa.

Why?  Because the mistakes were quickly fixed and apologies appeased the aggrieved customer.

With so many instances of consumer wrongs not being righted quickly enough — inspiring wonderful music like “United Breaks Guitars” — I am happy that things do get handled correctly and compassionately on occasion.

AT&T gets kudos from me for issuing a credit of almost $900 for data roaming charges on the new iPhone I was using on trips to the UK and Canada last month.  I fully expected phone calls to cost a pretty penny outside the United States but wrongly assumed I’d only get dinged when I hogged lots of bandwidth, like watching videos, which I didn’t do.

Sadly, I hadn’t told my iPhone not to retrieve mail every three minutes.  Nor had I realized early enough that Twitter and Facebook updates and Web usage would fall outside my all-you-can-eat domestic plan.  It wasn’t until the SMS alert popped up that I realized an international data plan would be needed to keep me from racking up massive fees. AT&T kindly offered me a free call to a U.S. phone number to speak with a customer service agent, but the projected hold time of 20 minutes meant my battery would run out before I could see how much I had spent.

Back in New York, my call to AT&T yielded good results.  The rep understood that my 48,000 kilobites of data usage would have cost me nothing if it had occurred in the United States, and that a plan costing less than $60 could have saved me from the $900+ gouge — if I had been counseled prior to my trip.  He recommended a credit be issued.  His supervisor agreed.  Two days late, I received an SMS and phone call saying my credit had been issued.

AT&T has taken plenty of flack for network performance and customer service.  In this case,  they did everything I asked, without argument.

Now, the company needs to start using Twitter as a conversational  tool rather than simply as a way to announce information. AT&T clearly has employees, policies and a culture designed around customer satisfaction.  Using Twitter to build community around the AT&T brand would make the organization’s  hard work visible to all.

Next to the App Store supporting Apple’s iPhone, I can’t think of any place more exciting and entrepreneurial in today’s media world than Twitter.

Not an hour goes by that I don’t read or hear about a new way to read, write, search, filter, evaluate and, yes, make money from the Twitter community.

What occassionally galls me are people who forget that they have an obligation to be upfront if the material they are writing is truly their own or if there’s some other motivation prompting them to tweet.

Luckily, many of the consumers of social media are pretty astute and able to out the hawkers who do too much pitching with a suspicious lack of bitching. 

What worries me even more than organizations that hire someone to talk up their cause or brand are those that use stealthy practices to make it look like they have captured the interest of the Twittering crowd.

The Dutch marketing consultancy Trendwatching,  founded by economist Reinier Evers,  tried such a tack with its latest research study.  Rather than publishing the data and using the above-board approach of sharing it with tastemakers, Trenchwatching acted like a carnival midway barker.

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, try your hand at winning a $250 Amazon.com gift certificate. All you’ve got to do is retweet the following text to your Twitter followers:

Check out trendwatching.com’s briefing on FOREVERISM: http://tinyurl.com/frvrsm

The sad part about Trendwatching’s “Annual Tell a Friend Giveaway” is that it was completely unnecessary.  The company’s “Foreverism” study on never-ending consumer and B2B conversations was top-shelf work and would have spread virally without hiring the equivilent of hobos to stand on street corners wearing Trendwatching  sandwich boards.

A comment made by Brian Solis at this week’s Media Relations Summit in New York triggered a walk down memory lane, or at least a flight over an island my avatar once visited.

Brian and his co-panelists were chatting about the current popularity of Twitter when he declared that the only completely worthless foray into social media thus far has been Second Life.

His slam on the Linden Lab virtual world stuck with me while full-time tweeters for jetBlue Airways, Southwest Airlines and Ford Motor Company received accolades for their stewardship of their respective brands.

Before joining Ford, Scott Monty worked with the self-described “social media insiders” that launched the agency Crayon by holding an event on the virtual island “Crayonville,” inside Second Life.

While Second Life and its currency of Linden dollars did not scale into a viable mass-marketing medium, it earned plenty of mass-media coverage and spawned experimentation that helped define a new career for people like Monty, jetBlue’s Morgan Johnston and Southwest’s Christi Day.

I was fortunate to work in a corporate environment with a long history of skunkworks projects.  PR Newswire EVP John Williams created an interactive T-button for press releases while most people were still using 9600-baud dial-up modems.  So flying around in Second Life in 2007 was not only  acceptable, but almost expected by PRN clients who were happy to see a partner willing to explore a world where avatar anarchists routinely trashed corporate buildings and disrupted attempts at commercialization.

What did PRN do in Second Life?  We gave away public toilets and changing rooms.  Of course, these rest rooms featured video display boards that carried the headlines of press releases originating from in-world businesses as well as out-of-world copy pertaining to social media.  We didn’t charge for distribution of releases inside Second Life, instead opting to collect donations for the Denver-based charity Water for People.  We also created the position of Ambassador to Second Life to build relationships with the owners of media properties and businesses in the community.

Needless to say, there wasn’t a sustainable business model for PR Newswire and most other companies inside Second Life.  But it was far from a failure on many levels.

Our “ambassador” picked up skills for one of the hottest customer service/PR/marketing jobs today — that of community manager within a social network like Twitter or Facebook.  A clean-water charity received a nice corporate donation.  Employees and select customers got the satisfaction of knowing PRN had dippped its toe in the water from an imaginary pixelated island to see if there was any business value.

In a way,  Solis, Crayon and other bleeding-edge marketers were also winners.  Sure, they were mocked for Coca Cola’s “virtual thirst” vending machines and Nissan’s attempt to give avatars Sentras to drive, but many of us were envious of their creativity and that they worked with clients who embraced new ideas.

New Yorker Sandy Cohen has started an unconventional translation company, Speaklike.  Rather than thriving on the conversion of encyclopedia-sized documents from English into Arabic or Portuguese, Sandy’s start-up offers Twitter users an inexpensive way to translate their 140-character messages into just about any language.

At about 25 cents per language per tweet, this can add up in a hurry.  But it’s a godsend for B2B and B2C users of Twitter who cater to multicultural and global audiences.   His service could also be used in the email and Web fulfillment world.

In another departure from the mainstream, Sandy is taking a play out of the Wikipedia playbook by crowd-sourcing his network of translators.  The similarity to Wikipedia ends there, though, as a fraction of each micropayment  will trickle down to the translations.  (Will this be the basis for a new Twitter economy in Brazil and Belarus?)

I just started using SpeakLike today and look forward to seeing if anyone in the Spanish-speaking world cares about my tweets.  My new Latino persona is @SenorDaveArmon.

The other interesting crowd-sourced translation business model involves Web video.  dotSUB , created by Michael Smolens, is free for users to upload video and a transcript so each spoken word appears as closed-captioning on the bottom of the video  (click on the “CC” button at the bottom of the player).  Those two steps opens up your video to the hearing-impaired audience.

For video producers who want to reach those who speak another language, dotSUB has a network of professional translators who will do the work for a few bucks (the charge was around $10 a video minute the last time I checked).  There are free translators who know how to use the dotSUB tool, but the content has to be interesting enough for someone to volunteer their time to convert your video into something that will win an Oscar in the Ukraine or Nepal.

There are already a few examples of marketing programs taking advantage of dotSUB and Speaklike.   Use the Comment function below to let me know your thoughts about these tools.

Sometimes fast isn’t fast enough.

As the Rochester, N.Y., reporter for UPI in the ’80s, it used to embarrass me to get a message from BROOKS-NXF (Dorthea Brooks on the New York Financial desk) saying Dow Jones had issued a snap on Kodak’s earnings, and that I should quickly match the story.

Sure enough, an envelope would arrive a few minutes later — via taxi cab — containing the Kodak press release.  For the next couple of quarters, I joined the queue of cabbies in the lobby of Kodak’s headquarters and got the release handed to me personally by the secretary of the PR department, and then dictated a lede to NXF by phone.  I started beating DJ, Reuters and AP.

Kodak’s subsquent use of PR Newswire, and PRN’s willingness to install a feed into my tiny UPI bureau, evened the playing field, though it probably drove a few angry taxi drivers to start buying Fuji film.

AP, Dow Jones and their ilk were built around speed, but subscribers gladly handed over fistfuls of dollars to be first with market-moving information.  No longer.  Not only are Internet delivery speeds faster today, but the democratization and demonetization of information means there’s virtually no barrier to being a publisher or consumer.

Sure, the media elite squawks a lot about the lack of fact checking and quality control among non-professionals.  But I firmly believe in the wisdom of the crowd and am perfectly happy to rely on Twitter or Wikipedia as a primary source of data, knowing that things might be wrong at times — in the same way the mainstream media makes mistakes.

My love affair with new media channels flared this morning while I was sipping my first cup of coffee.  Noisy fire trucks outside my window prompted me to check the live audio stream of FDNY radio transmissions on TheBravest.com, which was bustling with activity because a five-story building had collapsed minutes earlier in downtown Manhattan.

This site has become another prime example of nano-targeting in media.  Its user base is mainly off-duty firefighters, who use lingo like OMD for unoccupied multiple dwelling.  What amazes me is the technology smarts of those operating this site, which is supported by ads for calendars featuring photos of scantily clad female firefighters, and the books and gear used by first-responders.  Within 15 minutes, TheBravest had linked to the web video streams being webcast  by the helicopters of two local television stations, and live web chats were under way among site users commenting about the use of search dogs in the rubble of the building.  New media had connected to mainstream media though, of course, TheBravest wasn’t paying thousands of dollars an hour to charter the copter, hire the camera man, downlink the feeds, etc.

Similarly, did I turn to the tragically understaffed Cleveland Plain Dealer or Akron Beacon Journal for coverage of Saturday’s riot at Kent State University?  No, it was the @kent360 Twitter feed that provided provided the first details of police using rubber bullets to quell student unrest on a hot April evening.

For those who lament the loss of command-and-control newsrooms, these are sad times.

Yet I see the glass as more than half full.  Consumers can quickly get the news they seek, on virtually any topic at any time.  And the new breed of PR pro can truly brand themselves as domain experts and connect directly with the influentials in their sector — armed with nothing more than a Blackberry or iPhone.

With circulations and ad sales down, staff cuts up and red ink flowing out of control, it’s easy to draw the conclusion that the coroner has official pronounced mainstream media dead.

However, only a handful of corpses, like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Rocky Mountain News, have turned up at the morgue. There are still tens of thousands of dedicated, though deeply worried, employees at print, broadcast and Internet newsrooms who have yet to receive the memo that instructs that last one out to turn off the lights.

With newsstands selling newspapers, TV stations airing the six o’clock news, cable networks programming shows around the clock, and radio producers booking guests for talk shows, the public relations profession continues to define mainstream media placements as the Holy Grail.

Clearly, the more progressive PR firms and companies are using Twitter and Facebook, and communicating directly with consumers and influencers through social media. But it’s the crisis situations – like the unfortunate YouTube video by bored employees at a Domino’s pizza shop or the outrage expressed over Motrin’s mommy-sling ads – that come anywhere close to equaling the giant audience delivered by mainstream media.

At PR firms across the world, smiling and dialing, pitching and bitching, continue at this very moment in quest of a hit on NBC’s Today Show or a CEO profile in the Toledo Blade.

But the sad fact is most “professional” communicators are not agile or spontaneous enough to take advantage of on-the-fly opportunities to garner coverage for their clients or employer.  There’s too much advance scripting of pitches, most of which are not relevant to a reporter at that moment in time, and not enough help being offered in the coverage of the big event of the day.

This week, swine flu is the hot topic. You don’t have to be the Centers for Disease Control to become part of this story.

CVS should be donating soap and paper towels to schools to promote proper hand washing.

Deloitte and Mercer should be placing their practice area experts to discuss the importance of corporate planning for heightened absenteeism.

IBM, Google and GoToMyPC.com should be talking up the fact that commerce does not have to stop in today’s age of telecommuting.

Even Hasbro and Nintendo have an angle. With students staying home in Mexico and at the Queens school hit by swine flu, parents will want to stockpile more than facemasks and antibacterial wipes. Wii, Monopoly and Scrabble seem like good choices.

Any authors of parenting books out there? Their publicists should be offering them to assignment editors today to discuss 10 tips for keeping kids calm during pandemic mania.

In short, the only reason the news hole disappears for many PR pros during big stories is because of their lack of creativity in giving the media what they need when they need it.

Recently, while judging an awards competition involving the employees of Makovsky + Company, I was impressed to hear the agency has a daily “war room” session where the media’s focus is prioritized over prepared client pitches. A number of Makovsky’s biggest hits came because they swiftly matched client experts with the media while a story was at its peak.

If swine flu does not dominate the airwaves all week, dig deep into your roster of clients to see if you can help the media cover the other biggies: Obama’s 100^th day in office, Chrysler’s likely bankruptcy and Italian wedding, Bank of America’s shareholder meeting, and how the jobless will celebrate Mother’s Day this year.

Pounce now!