Ryan Grim, Senior Congressional Correspondent for the Huffington Post and author of the 2009 Wiley release “This is Your Country on Drugs” was billed as one of 6 speakers for Mopwater PR + Media Notes’ first PR. 2.0 panel  Twitch! Public Relations in the Age of Social Media on Thursday night in Washington, but ended up canceling last minute due to an emergency.

A journalistic emergency?

Not quite. Turns out, it was Grim’s third wedding anniversary, which he obviously could not skip.

Grim sent fellow Huffington Post reporter Arthur Delaney in his stead, and to avoid becoming an official Twitch Ditch, he also sent these responses via email to my questions about his use of social media during his reporting and sourcing.

Mopwater: How has social media changed how you do your job?
RG: The biggest shift I’ve seen is toward IM [instant message], both on Facebook, blackberries, gchat or plain old AIM. People seem more relaxed on IM. So build an IM relationship with a reporter.

Mopwater: How do you use social media to find sources for your stories?

RG: LinkedIn has been an enormous help and is a great way to find people online, as is Facebook. If you want reporters to be able to reach you, make those accounts as public as possible and have a phone number easy to find.

Here’s my broad point: The PR people who are successful for me are the ones who can get through. Getting through is a function of staying ahead of the stream of communication that rushes our way. Once, emailing a reporter was the way to do that, but the inbox now is so stuffed it’ll just get buried. There will continuously be new ways to stay ahead, though. Facebook chatting is a good and underused way now. Some reporters might get annoyed at getting a FB ping from a PR flak, but whatever. It’s not your job to make us happy, just to get our attention. A direct Twitter message would get through, too, as would a tweet with my handle in it. Reporters are always out there looking to see what people are tweeting or writing about their work, so you can trap us that way.

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You haven’t heard from me in a while because I have been working day and night putting together the very first Mopwater PR + Media Notes Panel, and it promises to be amazing. If you’re in the Washington, DC area, you won’t want to miss it. If you’re not, hopefully we can do some sort of recap for those of you who could not attend.

If you manage the public’s perception of your company or are concerned with increasing your organization’s media exposure in 2010, you will want to attend Twitch! Public Relations in the Age of Social Media. If you are like 80% of PR professionals who participated in the VOCUS fall survey on PR planning for 2010, you will be focusing more on social media this year. And if you are working in the nonprofit world, you probably can relate to the 85% of nonprofit executives polled by Weber Shandwick who say social media will be demanding a larger share of nonprofit spending dollars in 2010. But how do you harness the power of social media to get traditional media coverage? How do you embark upon, what I like to call, “social media relations?”

Find out how at Twitch! This event will feature a panel of working journalists who use social media daily to interact with PR professionals, communicators and the public. Think of this event as a “How to Pitch 2.0 Workshop.” Come with your questions about how to effectively use social media to land traditional media coverage. Learn how journalists are accepting pitches and twitches via twitter and Facebook, what they like and what they hate. Do some networking and  workshop the idea of social media relations.

Twitch! Public Relations in the Age of Social Media
Thursday, Jan 14, 2010
Busboys and Poets Langston Room
2021 14th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20009
Cost: $20
Note: Space is limited. We can’t accept payment on-site. You must register online through Eventbrite.

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Panel

Moderator:
Jim Long, NBC Universal / Verge New Media, LLC (@newmediajim)

Panelists:
Jennifer Nycz-Conner, Washington Business Journal (@jenconner)

Lindsey Mastis, WUSA News Channel 9 (@lindseymastis)

Ryan Grim, Huffington Post / Author of “This Is Your Country on Drugs.” (@ryangrim)

Jamila Bey, National Public Radio and WAMU (@jbey)

McLean Robbins, Washingtonian and DC Modern Luxury Magazines (@deacondoesdc)

Organizer:
Amanda Miller Littlejohn, Miller Littlejohn Media Group / Mopwater PR + Media Notes / Author of “The Mopwater PR + Media Notes Manual for a Stellar PR Career” (@amandamogul)

Other fun stuff:

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When referencing the event, before during and after, please use the #TwitchDC hashtag on Twitter.