If you have not read Claire Cain Miller’s story in the New York Times “Spinning the Web: P.R. In Silicon Valley” — you are missing an important look inside the ever-changing world of today’s marketing communications and public relations reality.

For her piece, Miller spoke with some of the smarter new media pros, like Brian Solis of Future Works, as well as someone I was previously unfamiliar with — Brooke Hammerling — whom Miller goes to great extent to tell us is very fond of name dropping.

While the piece focuses on the power of modern day P.R. for start-ups, Miller covers essential territory for anyone looking to succeed in the modern public relations discipline.

“Gone are the days when snaring attention for start-ups in the Valley meant mentions in print and on television, or even spotlights on technology Web sites and blogs,” she writes. “Now P.R. gurus court influential voices on the social Web to endorse new companies, Web sites or gadgets — a transformation that analysts and practitioners say is likely to permanently change the role of P.R. in the business world, and particularly in Silicon Valley.”

Permanently change the business world indeed.

As I’ve covered before, Pew data says a few months back (which means it’s far higher now) that 28 percent of Americans first get their news from Yahoo.com and 19 percent from MSN.com versus four percent and two percent from the Web sites of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal respectively.

Not to mention that in January of 2008, Facebook had 50 million users. In April it surpassed 200 million and its fastest growing demographic is women 34-55 (no, we are not just talking about 20-somethings). And don’t forget that Facebook users spend on average of three hours daily there.

When Miller is not telling us of the somewhat excruciating details of Hammerling’s self-congratulatory persona (bi-coastal birthday parties — are you kidding me?), she examines some intrinsic ground that many in the P.R. world continue to ignore, looking back at old-school P.R. when, “tools of the trade were largely limited to press releases and pitch letters, embargoes and exclusives and, of course, the legendary and often criticized parties….But the rise of blogs and social networks — and companies’ ability to post information on their own sites — transformed all this. Gradually, deadlines disappeared, as even monthly magazines offered Web sites that published stories by the minute.”

And once you get beyond Hammerling’s pomp, she clearly gets it — that relationships are king, she understands the flow of information, and recognizes how proper positioning can impact the way a story is received by the reading public.

When launching the new site Wordnik, Hammerling focused on one tech blogger, Caroline McCarthy at CNET, because, “she could have fun with it, as opposed to writing a business story.”

Amen sister.

And then, as Miller reports, Hammerling plans to “approach one journalist, Quentin Hardy at Forbes, not because she wants him to write about Wordnik in the magazine but because she hopes he’ll mention it on his personal Twitter and Facebook feeds.”

“I don’t know if this is a Forbes story at this point,” Hammerling told Miller. “I see it more of Quentin as an influencer, Quentin the person.”

And since we erroneously continue to solely gauge ourselves by impressions, lest we omit that in the end, by 6:30 p.m. on the day Wordnik went live, 1.43 million people had seen tweets (actually, just 1.43 million were “following” but didn’t necessarily see the Tweets), CNET and other blogs also wrote about the site, and none of the coverage was in print — mostly bloggers and social forums. The publicity sent 40,000 people to Wordnik’s Web site to perform 170,000 searches the following week.

Plus, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal are reportedly watching it as well, which is why traditional media has now evolved into the validating source of trends after the online and social forums have already covered an issue, product, or site in detail.

In the end, Miller’s piece outlines our new reality through the anecdotal window of Hammerling’s sound strategy and impressive results — all outlining the evolution of P.R., into, as Solis coined it, P.R. 2.0.