If you are a Web 2.0 or a social software startup trying to either launch a product or your company, getting relevant Buzz or Press is absolutely important. Long known to be the most cost effective means to generate awareness among potential users, PR gives you the sense of “arrival”. Notice I said cost effective NOT least expensive.

If you have been in the market over the last 2-3 months you already know that the best Web 2.0 PR folks, like Jeremy Pepper or Brian Solis (Disclaimer: Brian’s a cofounder at BuzzGain) are either already taken, or they are very expensive (most charge $10,000 minimum per month, or freelancers who charge $5000 / month). So if you have read about Do It Yourself PR and think that might be the best way to save some cash, the question becomes who (all) do you target to get good coverage.

The usual answer I hear is TechCrunch. They are no doubt the best, but you cant put all your eggs in the TechCrunch basket. Make a good target list just like you would for potential investors or customers.

It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out these folks should be on your list (In no particular order).

1. ReadWriteWeb

2. Mashable

3. Chris Brogan

4. Scobleizer

5. Jake McKee

6. Jeremiah Owyang

7. Webware

8. Louis Gray (Disclaimer: Louis is associated with BuzzGain)

9. Giga Om

10. VentureBeat

The best case situation is to brief them all. But if you dont have time, (which is strange, but not out of the ordinary) then how would you select which ones to focus on? Also remember each of these folks likes exclusives, so it does not hurt to focus on a subset each time.

If you follow the simple rule of thumb that you shoud focus on the ones with the most traffic to their site, I contend you will not have achieved your purpose – which is to get the MOST number of people to effectively have a chance to learn about your offering.

So what metrics do we apply? As we talked about blog authority and influence before, there are a whole host of other criteria, but here are the 3 that I would consider the most important.

1. Sentiment: Of the lot, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable and Chris are the most positive. Their article sentiment ratio is around 50-65% – very high and even with things that are not great, they accentuate the positive.

2. Outlinks: The number of links back to your site will give you a chance to convert awareness from PR into “potential leads” or prospects. The best link to post ratio (# of links per post) come from Louis, VentureBeat and GigaOm.

3. Engagement: Thanks to tagging, bookmarking, sharing Google feeds, tweeting, etc. you have the potential to reach a larger audience than visitors to your blog. So this extended audience should be counted into the overall metric for an individual’s reach. For extended reach Scobleizer, Chris and Louis are the best. Not only do they have a great number of followers on Twitter, friendfeed, delicious, etc., but their users are more engaged, clicking on links sent by these three than others.

So, if you had to make a call on exclusives, no doubt, focus on Rafe Needleman, Om Malik, Michael Arrington. Your best bang for the buck (for actual users) might come from some of these others.

Our advisor Louis Gray attended the Lifestreaming panel by MIT/Stanford where FriendFeed founder Brett Taylor presented in the session titled “Lifestreaming : The Real time web“.

There’s a very interesting statistic that Brett mentions in his presentation.

FriendFeed has stored over 100 million entries shared by FriendFeed users.

BuzzGain tracks about 82,353 (as of August 2008) users for friendfeed which counts the who’s who of technology early adopters as its users. According to our numbers, the “early adopters” for technology Web 2.0 startups ranges from the bleeding edge user to the cutting edge user, but still totals about ~1.7 Million globally. Over 64% of these are in the US.

These are your hyper enthusiasts, try anything first before anyone else does types of folks. You know; the kind that will stand in line for the Apple iPhone, 2 days ahead of schedule, the ones that are first to comment on every techcrunch post, and the ones that live blog every conference and seminar they attend.

BuzzGain tracks 1.7 Million “early adopters”, who frequently use (daily) about 4 Web2.0 applications and generate on average 1.7 posts daily (this is a big number BTW since the top users skew the numbers for the bottom of the list).

So how do we get 100,000,000 entries from 85K users? The active users of friendfeed (at least 1 comment weekly) per usage and one entry (either a blog post or a tweet, or a flickr photo upload) is about 61%. The rest either opened an account and never did anything with it, or just set it up and “forgot it”. For the sake of this argument I am going to assume every friendfeed account as an “active one”.

That works to about 1175 entries per user. Assuming they were live from Dec 2007 (or about 10 months), that works out to about ~117 entries per user per month. This is about 4 entries daily. So if you are an early adopter, you are blogging once daily, tweeting 2-4 times daily and maybe uploading photos once a week.

The average # of tweets (which is the # 1 Web 2.0 application used by Friendfeed users) per early adopter per day is 9.2 (roughly 79% of friendfeed users have a twitter profile).

My question on the number 100,000,000 from Brett is “So WHAT”?.

If every twitter user automatically posts their feed to friendfeed and that immediately constitutes an “entry” in friendfeed, why is that number even marginally useful?

Unless its just there to show a big number for the sake of showing momentum. Which I suspect is the case.