If you are interested in pursuing a career in the PR industry, a recent article in the New York Times does an excellent job of demonstrating how this industry has changed. In the past, the business of PR was more about creating the most eye-catching press release or having one or two connections with the top journalists of major newspapers. Today, the job is more about making multiple connections and knowing how to use social networking to its fullest.

In the article, the reporter focuses on the story of Brooke Hammerling, who is a successful publicist, and one of her clients, Erin McKean. McKean is an entrepreneur who was launching a new website called Wordnik.

In the past, the approach to spreading the word about a new business would have been rather cut and dry: create an eye-catching press release, send it to a few major journalists and hope that someone picks up on the story and gives the company the media attention you are looking for. Hammerling’s approach, however, is quite different from the traditional. Yet, it is very effective at getting the job done.

Through the magic of the Internet and social networking websites, McKean has managed to make a number of impressive connections. Not only do these can she call upon these contacts to help her spread the word about her clients’ startups, the mere fact that she knows such a large number of “somebodies” helps her get the attention of investors who might otherwise not be interested in listening to what she has to pitch to them.

Yet, when it came to spreading the word about Wordnik, Hammerling didn’t even have to go that far. Rather, she decided to take a much more subtle approach and to simply “whisper in the ears” of some of the most prominent people in Silicon Valley, including Digg’s Jay Adelson, Maholo’s Jason Calacanis and Twitter’s Biz Stone.

When it came time to spread the word about Wordnik, Hammerling didn’t put together a press release or pound the streets trying to spread the word about the startup company. First, because the source of revenue for the new company was still unclear, she decided to term it a “project” rather than a company. That way, once the media found out about Wordnik, they wouldn’t be able to pick it apart due to its lack of a solid business plan.

Next, Hammerling simply decided to get in touch with a handful of bloggers whose blogs focused on language, which is the same focus as Wordnik’s, as well as one tech blogger. She also contacted one journalist, but her hope with the journalist were not to get him to write a story in his magazine about Wordnik, but to simply mention the company in his Twitter and Facebook feeds. Hammerling also got in touch with Jay Adelson from Digg and set down the groundwork for a possible future partnership. The contact with Adelson paid off, as he sent out a tweet about the site when it went live.

When Digg’s founder, Kevin Rose, tweeted about the site and referred to as being “truly amazing” to his 759,310 followers, the combined effect of the blog posts and the tweets the site received helped bring in a significant amount of traffic when the site went live. In fact, by 6:30 pm on the day it went live, the staff at Wordnik estimated that 1.43 million people had already seen a tweet about the site. During the following week, an estimated 40,000 people checked the site out and performed 170,000 searches.

All the traffic caught the attention of The Wall Street Journal and USA Today and a couple different media companies contacted the site to discuss the possibility of forming partnerships – all without having to send out a single press release.

According to Hammerling, she utilizes this type of approach for about one-third of her clients. She says people want to broadcast on Twitter and to participate in social networks, and using this approach simply taps into the way people today are doing business. At the same time, she acknowledges that the industry will continue to change and, in the end, being a successful publicist always comes down to relationships.