This is my first post here, so I’m still getting the lay of the land as to what kinds of topics will interest K Street readers. I am an avid blog reader and definitely consider myself a “content curator”; Here’s the kind of stuff I read and write about on my blog.

So I thought I’d do two things. First, I want point you to a few PR/Public Affairs/Advocacy related blog posts I’ve found very interesting recently – and ask you to tell me if these float your boat or not. Check ‘em out.

1. HARO Gets Serious About Crowd Sourced Journalism (Convince and Convert)

I assume you know about HARO (Help a Reporter out), the email service started by Peter Shankman that matches reporters to sources. I used it for a while until I found the overload of irrelevant emails to be too much to handle – but they have finally got their act together and put together a nice looking site where it looks like you will be able to self-select what inquiries you get (as a source, obviously). Is this kind of sort-of tech news of interest?

2. Integrating Communication: PR-Driven Social Media (CopyWrite, Ink.)

The author proposes a model for marrying traditional PR duties and social media tasks. Check out the nice debate in the comments to the post. I have plenty of ideas about this (and the changing role of PR in general) – but I won’t say what side I fall on unless you tell me you want to talk about it!

3. 2010 Public Relations: Looking at the Past to Succeed in the Future (Conversation Agent)

Along the same lines, this is a fantastic guest post by Beth Harte on how to create “truly social public relations”. This is obviously a very hot topic (the Is PR Dead? debate)- let me know if you’re thinking about these kind of issues.

4. Matrix: Breakdown of Advocacy Marketing (Jeremiah Owyang)

Here’s a chart by Jeremiah Owyang where he dissects the layers involved in advocacy marketing – meaning, to him, activities “focused on the goal of spreading, and word of mouth, and viral”. What do you think?

5. Getting Started: Brands and Cause Marketing (Lauren Fernandez)

I’m putting this one in really to highlight a really great blog by a rising star in the PR world. Lauren is also heavily involved in the #u30pro (PR professionals under 30) community on Twitter and I think her crew has a lot of interesting stuff to say about PR and social media.

So please do tell me if these are the kinds of topics/analysis you’d want to read about from me!

The second thing I’d like to do is ask you to introduce yourselves in the comments. I’m new here, I’ve just walked into the cocktail party, heading to the bar first for a Makers and Coke (no lime), maybe a little nervous… someone please say hi and tell me what you’re all about! Then we’ll see if we can’t find some great connections to be made and conversations to be had…

Certain professions have it easier than others. If you’re a lobbyist, you cite legislation passed or defeated. If you’re a fundraiser, you count dollars raised. If you’re a political operative, you record a win-loss record.

Alas, if you’re a social media consultant, you probably shun such metrics. Sure, you’ve helped clients tweet and blog, but who among us hasn’t? Sure, you have 10 years of experience, but what have you achieved?

With the ever-growing pool of amateurs marketing themselves as authorities, the need to distinguish the talkers from the doers is urgent. And what better way to draw this distinction than through the crucible of numbers.

For instance, does your resume refer to “viral videos”? Sounds impressive, right? Well, how many views have these sensations attracted? Have you supported a Web site redesign? How much did that bolster traffic, and how many unique monthly visitors did that result in?

Did you manage an e-mail list? How many people subscribed to it, and how many joined under your watch? Did you conduct blogger outreach? Name five bloggers you’ve successfully pitched.

Did you execute search engine optimization? By what percentages did that drive up organic traffic and referral traffic, and how many negative and positive stories did you navigate in and out of the top 10 search results?

To be sure, numbers don’t paint a perfect picture. They omit client satisfaction, can elevate quantity to the detriment of quality, and can be massaged.

Moreover, numbers are only a means to an end. So, you doubled the audience for your podcast? Nice! Now tell us how this affected the bottom line. Did it engender a 30% bump in donations? A 50% jump in e-commerce sales? A 100% spike in membership?

Taking these extra steps requires extra work. Yet those confident in their CVs should embrace this charge. After all, there’s nothing like cold hard data to reveal that the common claim, “increased significantly,” in fact was a trivial 8% uptick.

Indeed, like the SAT, numbers serve a crucial purpose: They constitute a uniform, relatively transparent credential. As such, they help to address perhaps the biggest complaint about social media: How to measure its return on investment.

Census Turns to Kids for Help (Wall Street Journal)
The U.S. Census Bureau is running an interesting campaign targeted towards children in immigrant neighborhoods as a way to reach adults who don’t speak English.

And yet, bound by stale conventions that suffocate originality and don’t play well with multimedia, the press release has become obsolete. It’s not that there’s no longer a need to announce big news formally. It’s that there’s a better way to do it than drafting 400 words of boilerplate.

Indeed, as Claire Cain Miller reported in a much-discussed article last week, the pr agency representing Flickr never issued a release on its behalf—not even when Yahoo acquired the photo-sharing Web site. Similarly, when Google has exciting news to share, it does not use a wire service.

Rather, both companies self-publish blog posts. They do so, I suspect, not because blogs are hipper, but because they’re more genuine, more personal, and more flexible than their old media counterparts. Instead of a flack ghostwriting quotes for a CEO, the individual(s) who managed the project can craft a first-person narrative recounting the project’s past, present and future with pictures and videos and links. Then, as other bloggers pick up the post, “two days later, BusinessWeek calls,” as Donna Sokolsky Burke, of Spark PR, puts it.

When you visit Google’s online “press center,” the first thing listed is not press releases. It’s blog posts. If you think this is accidental, think again.

The press release is dead. Long live the press release.