If you are anything like me, you were deeply attracted to social media from the start. In fact, you couldn’t take your eyes off of SM. When you think about it now you get lost in a far-off gaze. It seems like yesterday: a scorching hot whirlwind romance that resulted in a passionate, long-term love affair.

Since those first days and weeks you and social media have laughed together, you’ve cried together, you’ve whispered nothings into SM’s ear. You’ve traveled the world. It’s been an affair to remember.

But let’s get real. You know — and I know — that you are feeling some buyer’s regret at this point. And so let’s get down to it. Let’s show our cards. Let’s go out on a limb here.

The brutal fact is that SM always seems distracted, focused on something or someone else, lacking in attention span to the extent that it’s embarrassing at parties. At first you deemed the cyberswedish accent cute, but frankly it’s getting a little old now. Social media claims to have a real job with benefits, but when you ask where the job is, SM gets all cagey and secretive. You never volunteered to be someone’s sugar daddy (or mama). You had more self-respect than that. Show me the money, sweetheart, show me the money. Social media still looks incredible and always turns heads, but what exactly does SM do all day? Really?

As the prophet Yoda said, “Give up hope do not.” Things WILL get better if you work at it. You need to invest in your relationship with social media. Good, healthy relationships do not survive in a vaccum. They survive and flourish through learning and personal growth.

To that end, I invite you to attend the upcoming Mass Technology Council Social Media Summit at the awesome Microsoft NERD Center in Cambridge, MA on Thursday, June 3.

Register: http://masstlcsocialmediasummit2010.eventbrite.com.

This exciting summit will feature a keynote by David Weinberger, Senior Researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and multiple break-out sessions lead by experts and practitioners who will discuss, debate and explore hot topics in the industry including:

- Advanced listening
- Lead generation
- Social media “outside the box”
- Overcoming internal resistance to social media
- Social media in regulated industries

You and social media will leave the NERD Center together and walk along the Charles River on that sweet springtime afternoon. Perhaps a fine mist will hover over the water and you and social media will capture the memory in a photograph and share it with you friends around the world. You will leave the NERD Center that day with renewed feelings of love, trust and passion for social media. That sounds like a good investment to me.

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Media consolidation isn’t only changing the face of media forever; it’s also having an enormous impact on the way we as PR professionals do business.

Recently, some of us at Topaz got together to discuss what these ongoing changes means for the public relations industry. Certainly they offer challenges, but also unique opportunities for creative communicators.

Take a listen. How has the changing media landscape affected you? Are you concerned, excited, both?

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In all the discussion of PR and media consolidation, there’s one important area we haven’t yet touched on -”listening” and the tools available to us to monitor and analyze happenings that we can use to place more relevant content. It’s a topic we’ve talked about a lot recently at Topaz — and one others are focusing on as well. Sam Whitmore just touched on this — and that’s what got me thinking about the connection to our “PR and media consolidation” topic. Monitoring has long been an important part of Topaz’s approach to PR — when we “trendjack” (use breaking news and issues as a launch-pad for a proactive media pitch), it’s essential to have early and comprehensive access to the “trend” as it makes for a more compelling and pitch-able story. The same is true with the kind of content placement we’ve been talking about on this blog, in our newsletter (if you haven’t seen this let us know and we’ll sign you up) and our Topaz podcast (soon coming your way). Monitoring tools — both social media and traditional — can help us make the articles, blog posts and other content we’re developing and placing more relevant and, as a result, more interesting. So it’s important to find and use the right tools. I won’t go into that here — I’ve gone on long enough — but Sam and others here at Topaz can shed some light.

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