Last week TJ Dietderich, of PR Breakfast Club fame, posed a simple question to me:  I get a lot of questions from friends looking to switch to PR as a career. What are the best online resources to send them to? …

If you work in PR, chances are you have one of three needs:

* A need to build or grow your network.

* A need to acquire new skills or hone existing ones.

* A need to find a new job.

While you could argue many social networks meet these three needs adequately, I might argue that LinkedIn has the biggest potential to meet these needs best when it comes to professional skill-building, networking and job-seeking.

But, are folks capitalizing on that opportunity within LinkedIn now? Not so much.

The question was asked here yesterday by Joe Hall and there were as many opinions as there are colors in a bag of Skittles but as of this morning the jury is in.

On the tail of the Oscars this weekend comes a story from the NY Times. I have read it several times because I can’t get over the possibilities. The possibilities of what you ask?

Chrysler didn’t want to appear ungrateful to the American taxpayers, so CEO Bob Nardelli took out full-page ads in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today to thank them for putting up their money instead of well-heeled Cerberus putting up its own. Reposting the expensive thank-you note on the company blog showed, however, America hates huge wastes of money more than it hates ingratitude.

If you want to optimize your Google rankings, who do you hire? An SEO, right?

If you need some web development stuff done, who do you pick? A web dev firm, right?

Now, if you want to implement an online public relations campaign, who do you turn to?

I’m participating in EuroBlog 2008, a two-day conference that mashes up academia and PR to produce an event that I’m sure will be worth the time of everyone attending, speakers and guests alike.

Research shows that half of the agency/client relationships out there last less than two years.

This is from a sample of about 140 companies with an annual marketing spend of at least $2 million, including Citibank, General Mills, IBM, GE, and ESPN.

After nearly 15 years in agencies, this percentage sounds about right. But where the research tries to determine why this is the case, I take issue with it.

Alan Scott, Dow Jones & Co. SVP and chief marketing officer, said it’s a cool time to be a marketing guy, as consumer expectations of businesses have changed with the rise in blogs and social media.

Pick whichever cliché you like: what goes around comes around; you catch more flies with honey; adding insult to injury; cutting off your nose to spite your face; his butt would make Harold a Sunday face. They all could apply here – maybe not that last one; just something my grandfather used to say.

With the new Google Public Policy Blog, transparency’s the name of the game; Googlers will explain the company’s position on issues that could affect us all.

There have been a series of interesting posts, comments, and opinions regarding why PR doesn’t work and why so many CEOs have a bad taste in their mouth at the mere mention of public relations.

Recently, I sat on a panel for PRSA Healthcare on social media. I brought along the PR blogger perspective, and sat on it with the VP at Technorati and Amy Tenderich, from Diabetes Mine.

Healthcare is different from other practices in PR. You have the whole direct-to-consumer guidelines from the FDA, and then you have a ton of other issues in dealing with the press and social media.

This article will be part tutorial, part sweating the small stuff. The tutorial is much, much shorter and more basic than the rest, so we’ll get to it first. AOL needs to hear it.

Bullying is a serious issue. It makes people feel bad, makes them do things that they might not necesarily want to do, and forces people’s hands. Cyberbullying is worse – it takes all those things, puts them online in blogs or journals or social networks, and ramps it up a level via emails, Twitters and text messaging, and instant messages.

While I’m finishing the book, I wanted to do a quick post about “Punk Marketing: Get off your ass and join the revolution.” Richard Laermer, my cohort in crime at the Bad Pitch blog, wrote it with Mark Simmons.

Sony’s recent dust-up with gaming blog Kotaku over their publication of a Playstation rumor ended up being handled much more quickly than their previous public relations blunders.

Our favorite format isn’t dead; it’s just abused more than Ronn Torossian at a Gawker staff meeting.

The Republican party and Edelman, the public relations firm, have something in common these days. Both are suffering a crisis of confidence of their own making.

Some PR news on the front page of TechMeme today.

Later today I’ll be presenting here at DMA-06 on a panel called, Blogs, RSS and Podcasting with Amanda Watlington from Searching for Profit and Stephan Spencer from Netconcepts. Basically, my presentation will cover how blogs can be used as public relations tools in the context of “Push and Pull PR”. The presentation is broken up into:

When Sprint sent an LG Fusic phone to a blogger in hopes he would write about it and Sprint’s new Power Vision Network, they may have understood the slight possibility he would write a negative review. But they probably didn’t expect 3,100 words (seven pages) about how much he hated both.