Many applications exist for monitoring social media buzz, but what about tools for the first step of online promotion: Creating the buzz in the first place? BuzzStream attempts to address the issue by allowing users to bookmark and track potential media and backlink contacts. It's an unusual solution, and one that we find intriguing. Read on for more info and beta invites.

In the entry forms, users can drill down for more information, from PageRank and site age to WhoIs lookup data and Technorati rank. As a group of people who get a lot of inbound mail from PR folks, we can tell you that this is a good thing. The more a press-seeker knows about the journalist in question, the more targeted and welcome the appeal for coverage is likely to be.

A welcome addition to this part of the app would be a tag cloud to ensure the contact is a relevant match. For example, we occasionally get pitches to review non-web related hardware. A PR pro or other evangelist could use such a feature to determine that our site might not be the best place to pitch his product.

Also, unless we missed something, we didn't see a good way for discovering new media or backlink contacts. A referral system ("Users who made this author a contact also added...") would probably be an awesome tool for users.

On the link-building side, the app allows users to denote the stage of the relationship, the method of link acquisition, and other relevant factors. We wish it showed whether links were search-bot followed or no-follow links, but perhaps this request will be heard and discussed for future releases of the product.

Once a contact is added, Twitter and email conversations with that contact can be easily indexed for future reference. Watch the demo video for a closer look at how contacts and link-building campaigns are managed from the back end.

What we like about the service is that it addresses the problem of social media optimization. In modern times, SEO is no longer enough to supply a site with competition-killing traffic. No-follow links are no longer the huge bummer they once were. Organic search traffic counts, and social sharing traffic counts, too. BuzzStream takes this all into account rather nicely and simply and allows busy PR and social web folks to efficiently and profitably manage those relationships.

As a new site, BuzzSearch is still a bit buggy. Not all available information is correctly and automatically indexed. Still, it's a good start and we look forward to seeing what these guys do next.

Two hundred fifty beta invites are available at the BuzzStream site. Hope you enjoy, and don't forget to send in your feedback to the founders.

Townsend was CEO of Avis, an auto rental company, who took on the much bigger Hertz with the "We try harder" proposition, a classic story for scrappy number two players beating up on the gorilla. The book is full of timeless wisdom, but the relevant bit here is the way he allowed all his managers to speak to the press without any prepared script. His simple point was, if you were a journalist, who would you want to talk to when a big story breaks? Hertz's PR department or the guys actually running the business at Avis? That's right. Back in 1970, this guy was saying, "loosen up, forget about command and control, let front line managers make the call."

He was radical on other fronts. His book was organized alphabetically, for example. Under P for Personnel Department his pithy advice (I am going from memory here) was, "fire them, people manage people." But that's another story.

His advice on PR is even more critical today. The Internet makes command and control models pretty obsolete. Sure, some data has to be controlled. The financial results for a public company need to be issued in a certain way to comply with SEC regulations. But that's about it. Whether you use a newswire service or your blog, the key is lighten up on the process and get into the flow. That flow may be a blog, or Twitter, or Facebook or any of the above and more. The general point is simply about availability and transparency.

If you really have a great story to tell, that will get even the most jaded journalist interested.

Public relations needs to evolve from gatekeeper and process manager to coach, helping the front line managers work effectively with media and the market. That assumes that their clients are enlightened enough to give them that mandate.

"Dear Richard,

Below, please find a press release from Hyster Company presenting the Hyster® Fortis® line of lift trucks. The Hyster Fortis product line represents a transformation in the way lift trucks are designed, built and acquired. Incorporating proven design processes and systems, each Fortis lift truck is offered with multiple powertrain configurations to meet specific application requirements and business objectives and to optimize productivity, dependability and cost of operations.

We thought Read/WriteWeb readers would find this news of interest."

Thanks Hyster!! For the edification of Read/WriteWeb readers, here is an image of the afore-mentioned lift truck:

(normal RWW service will now resume...)

UPDATE: Nick asked a good - and serious - question in the comments: "So what exactly would you like to see when it comes to a pitch from a small company looking to inform you about a relevant product or service your readers may find useful?"

It's a great question and deserves a response, because I recognize that it is difficult for a smallco to get on our radar. So here's my reply to Nick and all other startups pitching us:

Relevancy is obviously a key point, but one thing small companies can also do is to send us a unique angle. Often companies will send the same pitch to everyone - and in those cases unless a blog is first to post, there's usually not much for other blogs to post about.

Also bear in mind that RWW is an analysis blog, so we like to hear about your industry as a whole and how you fit in -- i.e. give us some context.

Those are a couple of tips, but also bear in mind that we get a lot of pitches daily and there's no way we can look into them all, or even reply to your email. I wish there was a way we could, but we have limited resources and because we are an analysis blog we have to pick and choose our subjects -- then analyse them, which takes time. So I imagine it's harder for PR companies to pitch RWW, because we are necessarily selective (i.e. we don't copy and paste PR multiple times a day, like some tech blogs).

All that said, also I recommend you email tips@readwriteweb.com and not my personal email, as the tips address reaches all our authors (me included).