At the end of June, Peter Shankman of helpareporter.com  asked for ideas to promote his unique media resource–and the first thing that came to mind was leveraging the very resource he started his project on– Facebook.  Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is a service that enables reporters and PR contacts/experts to easily connect for free. Peter (brilliantly) started this on his own as a Facebook group and it had grown to 13,000 people by the time he asked for ideas for publicity.

My idea was simply to use the crowd (at large) to spread the word– and that doing it on a specific day would be best. I honestly couldn’t believe that they had chosen my idea to implement– but definitely got a kick out of the whole process.

The HARO day went into effect yesterday (July 17) – and thousands of people blogged, had Facebook, twitter, utterz, LinkedIn status updates about the service. And it worked! Almost 1,000 people joined in 24 hours (membership now at 15,000+ sources/media).

I can not express how cool I think that is– with no major prep time Peter was able to mobilize thousands of people to promote a very worthwhile service. It’s taking user generated content to PR to create a different type of word of mouth. 

I had a discussion with David Berkowitz of MediaPost a few weeks ago about how it seems like the social media discussion (especially in PR) often still centers on the basics of ‘how to’ implement social media strategies. The discussion that should be happening is how to effectively utilize what we have and continue to challange our view of the social media world.

I think it will be interesting to see how the Web 2.0 matures. Inherently how people communicate is changing– for many it seems that the social media/networking world replacing the idea of a neighborhood community– and I think it makes sense that we will succeed in this community by only by virtually recreating the things/experiences that have worked in the “real world.”