We've been happy in recent months to get to know Charles Best, a former teacher in the New York City public schools who founded a nonprofit called DonorsChoose that makes great use of the Web.

DonorsChoose enables you to bring a classroom project to life—a reading corner, a field trip, a computer lab, or whatever most inspires you. Search for a state, ZIP code or topic and you'll see specific projects you can support. The Omidyar Network, an early investor in FM, is supporting the effort, and it's already paying off for kids and teachers all over the United States.

We’re so excited about their upcoming Blogger Challenge that we’ve distributed a philanthropic gift certificate to each FM author, so they can fund the classroom projects of their choice and then encourage their readers to help out.

We’re also sponsoring an award for the bloggers (FM or not -- open to all) who come up with the most creative incentive for their readers to give. So see what you can do with your passionate readers!

Does it seem like FM is growing? Yup, we sure are. Two more great additions to report today: Karleen Engel joins us as an Account Coordinator in our sales department just months after graduating from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles with a Public Relations degree and a Business Administration minor. I'm willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, even though my Golden Bears are ranked a few notches below her Trojans....Karleen has had a variety of internships including one in the PR department of fashion house Michael Kors in NYC as well as one with Santa Monica based online media company Demand Media. Originally from Texas, she is excited to get to know the Bay Area.

And Galina Lee joins us as assistant to Chas Edwards, our CRO and Publisher. It's about time, Chas really has been a bit frazzled lately, what with leading the team that has taken FM and its authors to quarterly eight-figure revenues. Galina joins FM after 10 years of senior executive assistance, most recently from the entertainment and media world where she was the administrator and broadcast producer for Coyote Films.

Welcome, Galina and Karleen!

James Navin joined us last month as Vice President, Product Management. James possesses a broad professional background that includes time spent in the Internet, telecom, software, and energy industries in corporate functions ranging from Product Management to Business Development to Accounting. He came to FM following two years of leading the Product Management function at Yipes, an enterprise network service provider. His academic years were spent studying Economics and Statistics when, among other things, he once taught an undergraduate Finance class on commodities derivatives theory. Welcome to FM, James!

If you're interested in that conference FM hosted earlier this month, the first batch of videos are up. Some are quite long, and take a while to load in flash, but once they do, they play smoothly. My favorites:

The Opening (yeah, it's me, but I frame what I mean by all this, if that interests you.)
Scott Cook (very thoughtful)
Steve Hayden sets up the day

More will be up as time permits, so check back if you're interested.

Mark Cheong joins us as an account executive in our Bay Area office. Mark has over seven years of experience in sales/biz dev roles at entrepreneurial oriented companies in both the traditional and online marketing worlds. Recently, he was the General Manager of a boutique digital marketing firm based in the "OC." He received his MBA from Pepperdine's Graziadio School of Business. When not voraciously consuming media or imposing his musical tastes on others, he can be found attempting to write somewhat coherently on his blog here.

Chas has written up a great example of the kind of conversational marketing FM can bring to brands like JC Penney, in this case, a Fall Shopping Guide.

John Schnieder joins FM as our Director of Sales, East from Yahoo. After dabbling in finance and telecom, he established himself in the internet community with HotJobs.com in 1999 and stayed on after being acquired by Yahoo in 2002. Starting off in San Francisco and ultimately ending up in New York, he served as an integral part of the sales organization as an Account Executive, Sales Manager, and Director of Sales. Originally from Boston, John graduated from Wake Forest University in North Carolina. Welcome, John!

Liam Boylan joins the FM advertising operations team from Waiterpad Point-of-Sale Systems, where honed his client service and tech troubleshooting skills. A graduate of Santa Clara University, he holds a bachelor’s degree in Communications and Studio Art. Liam enjoys art and design tasks recreationally and on an occasional freelance basis, and considers himself one of the greatest Mario Soccer stylists alive. Welcome to the team!

David Churbuk is a marketer, he works with Lenovo. He's a pretty senior dude. And he writes one killer blog. This post is a great exemplar. Marketers with voices like this, well, it warms my heart.

It was a crowded week, with a lot of news, but I wanted to point you all to this announcement from Comscore, in which conversational media gets a new and more accurate look. Finally. FM was part of making this happen, and I am very proud we were.

Coverage here and here and here.

We're thrilled that the first annual CM Summit is underway, and we took the event as an opportunity to release a bit of news, pasted below. We've done this in the past, our last release on new authors and the business in general was back in February.
We're really proud of our authors, their growth, and the support that our marketing partners have given them.

SAUSALITO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--As it convenes its first Conversational Marketing Summit today, Federated Media Publishing (FM) is announcing that it has reached a number of significant milestones. The company now has more than 600,000,000 page views per month under management, which translates to more than 1.5 billion available ad impressions.

Those pages are seen by more than 41 million unique users per month, according to data released today by comScore Inc. in its new Conversational Media Report.

FM represents more than 140 sites, including these new ones added in recent months:

* ArmchairGM (http://www.armchairgm.com), an active community of passionate sports fans
* The Bargainist (http://www.bargainist.com), a wonderful find for anyone who likes a discount
* Boing Boing Gadgets (http://gadgets.boingboing.net), a new offering from the creators of the world's favorite blog, BoingBoing.net
* Confessions of a Pioneer Woman (http://www.thepioneerwoman.com) and The Pioneer Woman Cooks (http://www.thepioneerwomancooks.com), two popular blogs from a California mom transplanted to Oklahoma
* High-Def Digest (http://www.highdefdigest.com), chronicling the growth of, and competition between, the Blu-ray and HD DVD video formats
* Last100 (http://www.last100.com), a blog focused on developments affecting the "last 100" feet of the Internet, from the computer to the television
* MakeupAlley (http://www.makeupalley.com), an eight-year-old social community of beauty consumers, with millions of tips, photos, comments and reviews
* Mashable (http://www.mashable.com), the definitive source for news on social networking companies
* NotCouture (http://www.notcouture.com) and Tastespotting (http://www.tastespotting.com), new blogs from NOTCOT founder Jean Aw
* OpenRoad.TV (http://www.openroad.tv), a collection of many years worth of TV content on travels around the Western United States
* Silicon Alley Insider (http://www.alleyinsider.com), offering breaking news and analysis of digital and tech news in New York; co-founded by Henry Blodget
* TravBuddy (http://www.travbuddy.com), a community that has a million registered users, thousands of travel blogs and reviews, and hundreds of thousands of pictures
* WebbAlert (http://www.webbalert.com), a new daily video news show about technology hosted by X-Play's Morgan Webb

Conversational Marketing Summit Opens

More than 300 people are meeting in San Francisco's beautiful Presidio today and tomorrow at the first Conversational Marketing Summit, which brings together leaders in conversational media and marketing for a two-day dialog around the issues, lessons, and opportunities of this emerging medium. They're hearing case studies from a number of brands, including, Cisco, Dove, GM, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Symantec and Virgin, and agencies including Anomaly, Carat, Ogilvy, OMD, McCann and Starcom.

Attendees are also meeting authors from some of the most successful Conversational Marketing sites, including Ask A Ninja, Boing Boing, Celebrity Baby Blog, Digg, Duct Tape Marketing, Gear Live, Left Lane News and many others. The event is made possible by diamond sponsors HP and Microsoft; platinum sponsors Ask.com, Intel and Symantec; gold sponsors Dell, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, Palm, Toshiba and WebEx; supporting sponsor Virgin America; and media partner Advertising Age.

The summit comes at a time when FM has completed a number of innovative and successful conversational and integrated marketing campaigns:

* An Ask.com partnership with FM's Ask A Ninja resulted in a phenomenal eight percent click-through rate, tightly integrating the message with the website and its well-known star, the Ninja.
* HP's "Print Posts" campaign made printing a regular, clean, well-formatted and integrated part of many Web sites, while its innovative "Voice Posting" initiative introduced eight influential bloggers and their audiences to the idea of sharing ideas through online audio posts.
* Toshiba's "Tech Battle Royale" brought influential voices to a conversation about innovative technologies in a fun and editorially appropriate way.

Growth on Many Fronts

FM continues to expand not only the numbers of blogs, page views and users, but its relationships with advertisers and the kinds of services it offers:

* The advertising sales team has grown, adding people to its New York and Sausalito offices and hiring in Los Angeles and Chicago.
* The new business development team is building relationships for syndication of FM authors' content and new revenue-producing tools for those authors to use on their sites.
* The engineering team is continuously developing new solutions, such as the technology behind HP’s Voice Posting, a dynamic RSS-fed ad unit for Symantec and an inventory-optimization system in use by more than half of FM’s authors that brings them the highest possible revenue for each page view.

About Federated Media

At FM, we believe great voices attract great audiences. We're in the business of supporting those voices by connecting them to great marketers, as well as providing a suite of services that let authors focus on what they do best: make compelling media. In so doing, we are creating federations of respected voices that prosper on their own terms. Current federations include Sports, Technology, Automotive, Business & Marketing, Media & Entertainment, Momentum, Travel & Leisure and Parenting. For more information, please go to http://www.federatedmedia.net.

Yeah yeah yeah!

Scott nails it again here. This is increasingly what we are finding in our work at FM - that marketers who start with the question "What can I do to help my (potential) customer" are winning - by starting with how they can build value in a conversation, they build great brands.

I hate to say it, but we need to re-draw the wheel one more time. This time, take the brand out of the center spot and replace it with your customers—audience and advertisers. Yes, media products should still think of themselves as brands, but everything they do needs to be organized around serving the customer, and the only way to create a truly customer-focused operation (rather than just mouthing the words) is to start at the core and build out. Sometimes the best first step is simply to draw a diagram of the model and share it with your organization.