I have been asked to speak at a dinner for the PR Communications Committee of American Business management next Tuesday in New York City. Lloyd Trufleman of Trylon Communications will be acting as the host (Trylon is sponsoring the event), and Ben Silverman and I are the talking heads. The topic is "Blogs and the Impact on Media Companies."

Ben recently penned Can Blogs Impact Your Brand, and made some great points:

As anyone with a website knows, drawing traffic to a new property is a difficult proposition. This is why I've been surprised with the amount of readers I've been able to garner in a very short period of time (I launched the blog on Feb. 16). Most of these readers appear to be one-time visitors, but looking through my traffic logs, I've been able to figure out why they came to my blog. For the companies that I've written negatively about, this is not a good thing.

Take, for example, Anheuser-Busch. A short entry I wrote about the company's new beer, Bud Select, appears on page 3 of Google's search results for the term "Bud Select." Below is an excerpt of what I wrote about the beer. You tell me if you would want a prospective consumer reading this.

"Anheuser-Busch is marketing its new beer, Bud Select, as a new kind of beer, brewed for a crisp taste with no aftertaste. It's low carb and low in calories. It also sucks," I wrote. "Not only does Bud Select have no aftertaste, it has no taste. It's like drinking club soda that has been watered down and mixed with flat light beer. I drank one Bud Select and it was so bad that when I went to urinate afterwards, I apologized to the toilet."

Ouch. Thus far, over 200 people have come to my website via a search for Bud Select.

This is a fun guy to spend an evening with, I bet.

I couldn't find anything about the event at the ABM website, which has no blogs as far as I can tell.

Here's the invitation, which was emailed to me as an image, so I couldn't click on any other the things that look like links. I don't know if the ABM understands what's happening on the Internet.