MediaWeek recently published a great social media toolkit for anyone active in communications or PR. The mag’s 2010 Digital Hotlist ranks the social media websites and communications tools that are having the greatest impact on American information consumers.

Another report found that the majority of Americans don’t trust the media. Nearly half of Americans (48 percent) said the media is too liberal, 33 percent found the media to be “about right,” and only 15 percent said the media was too conservative.

Women are often referred to as the key to the household. They make 85 percent of all brand purchases in the U.S., and in less than 10 years will control two-thirds of total consumer wealth. With all of this purchasing power at their fingertips, the obvious question posed by PR professionals is, simply, how do we reach them?

If you follow the Gibraltar blog, you’ve no doubt read on numerous occasions several of us comment on the value of the Internet and social media and the key role it can play in a company’s ongoing communications efforts.  Again, that point of view was validated last week with the release of a report by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

I am often asked to define the value of a public relations firm and what our services actually can bring to a client or potential client. Having served on “both sides” of the equation—as a corporate communications officer for two Fortune 500 companies and as a board member hiring PR firms—and now as a founder of a leading PR firm, I feel uniquely qualified to answer.

My family is from Chile, and despite the fact that I’ve never spent more than two weeks there at a time, when I am in Santiago or spending time in Viña del Mar surrounded by my grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends, I really feel at home. Growing up, I always had to explain to friends that it’s pronounced “CHEE-Leh” not “Chili.” And no, it is not something found in the refrigerator next to the ketchup, it is the country in South America that looks like a piece of spaghetti and runs down the western coast.

As we head into the last few months of the year, many PR professionals find themselves using Q4 as a time to make sure all the promises they made to their clients a few months ago will be delivered—if not surpassed—by year’s end. This is why I think the release of the Media Spamming Charter couldn’t have come at a better time.

I am on a flight to LA, tepid decaf alongside me, watching one of those drippy in-flight movies where women flee to Italy to find true love, and they spend much of the movie laughing alongside their elder-stateswoman actress counterparts, their faces iridescent in the glow of candlelight the color of honey. There is always some clever, devilishly handsome chap, who ends up stealing her heart.

Recently, I found myself advising a client that all financial journalists secretly wish to be reporters of general news.

“I went to a garden party” (with apologies to former teen idol Ricky Nelson) last night in Georgetown. It was a combination birthday celebration and book signing with Arianna Huffington who wrote the New York Times bestseller Third World America.