Lara Kretler’s blog

Today marks the first entry in my new series, the Friday Five – a weekly collection of my favorite new or cool web2.0 tools, tips and tricks. It’s named after one of the best times of the week – 5 p.m. every Friday.

It’s bitterly cold outside and the economy is still tanking, but there are always things to get excited about in the wonderful world of social media. Here’s this week’s round-up.

1. The hashtag #SolisOH. This week, Silicon Valley PR2.0 guru Brian Solis visited chilly Columbus, Ohio to share insights from his latest book, Putting the Public Back in Public Relations: How Social Media is Reinventing the Aging Business of PR. It was great to meet Brian, hear him speak and join a room full of my friends, colleagues and fellow Central Ohio PRSA members live-Tweeting the highlights from his presentation. You can read the collective notes via the Tweetstream. There were some great nuggets of info and I’m looking forward to diving into my new (and autographed, I might add) book. Big thanks to Brian for sharing his expertise with Columbus and taking some great photos of our town while he was here.

2. HootSuite. Formerly known as BrightKit, HootSuite is my favorite Twitter tool for managing and measuring multiple accounts simultaneously. The dashboard is simple to use and it even allows you to queue up Tweets to be sent at a later time or date specified by you. This would be great for anyone planning a vacation but still wanting to keep a Twitter account active and interesting. Plus, with a name like HootSuite, it’s got to be good, right?

3. Popular Delicious bookmarks. At any moment in time, people are saving articles, links and sites to Delicious and tagging them for easy recall and reference later. But how do you find what’s most popular in your niche? Visit http://delicious.com/popular/socialmedia only instead of social media, that last word should be whatever keyword floats your boat. For me, it’s either socialmedia or PR or some combination thereof - like PR2.0. Experiment with different keywords and you’ll be amazed at what you may find. Recently a visiting PR student asked me how I stay on top of what’s new in the world of social media and web2.0. This little Delicious “what’s popular” trick is one of my secret weapons – so Callie, now you know too.

4. Backtype. If you’re active as a blog commenter and conversator (and I hope you are), it can be hard to remember everywhere you’ve traveled and commented in the blogosphere. Now, there’s a tool that allows you to keep track of all your comments – or even the blog comments of other bloggers whose thoughts and insights you value. Backtype allows you to “claim” your comments so that they can be discovered, followed and shared. It also allows you to subscribe to the blog comments of other Backtype users, which can be a great way to find out which blogs your favorite bloggers read. You can use the service to monitor blog comments for a particular keyword. And, as someone who manages a team of bloggers, it helps me keep track of who is out there commenting and promoting our Fahlgren Mortine blog.

5. The phenomenon known as #Journchat. If you’re in PR or the media business, you should know about the Monday night Twitter events known as #Journchat. You can follow the Tweetstream here, visit the blog for recaps here or check out the Facebook group here. The brainchild of PR rockstar Sarah Evans, #Journchat has to be experienced to be believed – it’s a fantastic ongoing weekly conversation between PR pros and journalists with the goal of making all our jobs just a little easier. It’s a great way to find smart people to follow on Twitter, learn how to work better with “the dark side” (which side that is varies according to your perspective, of course) and maybe even pitch a story or find a great new source. If you’re not doing anything Monday nights at 8 p.m. EST, I highly recommend you head to Twitter and join the conversation.

So, that’s my first edition of the Friday Five. What do you think? Let me know if you found this useful. In the meantime, I’ll start collecting more shiny new tools and toys to share with you next week.