When Brian Bailey and Dexter Fabian decided to bid on Item #03 in the CL Online Holiday Auction — "Buy the news: You decide the story, you pick the CL staffer to write it" — they figured the story they'd commission would be about, well, themselves. Or rather, about their popular website ILoveTheBurg.com and its companion Facebook page, Downtown St. Pete. A daily compendium of what's happening around town, the page is so lively and well-maintained that it has attracted more than 14,000 fans. It's partly a labor of love — these guys do in fact love the Burg — but it's also meant to showcase the social networking expertise they offer clients of their PR/marketing/graphic design firm, Rearden Killion Communications.

"It's no small feat that we created this following," says Bailey, who was a senior vice president at the Manhattan advertising firm Rubenstein Associates before moving to the Burg in 2003. "Everybody does it wrong on Facebook. People go out there with a strictly promotional attitude — they don't elicit the response. We just look for what people will be interested in hearing."

[Full disclosure: Bailey and Fabian are neighbors of mine and have worked on projects with my partner, Larry Biddle. But I had no idea they were taking part in CL's auction till I heard from our online producer that they'd placed a winning bid.]

A few hours before the team won the auction, one of their Facebook fans, Michelle Greene Hurd, dropped them an e-mail: She'd just been laid off, she told them, and did they know of any jobs?

That's when they decided they could use their CL page for a greater good.

This article appears in Jan 20-26, 2010.