Valley PR Blog

Twitter overview for the faint of heart

By Linda VandeVrede on May 6th, 2009 In Best Practices, Social Media

Are you a senior PR professional still unsure about twitter?  You should have attended the master practitioners meeting tonight at The Kitchen.   Ryan Zuk of Sage Software, also the social media columnist for PR Tactics, gave a twitter overview to about a dozen of us.   Here are the highlights:

• Think of twitter as a micro-blog — providing and sharing information in bite-sized nuggets.
• Twitter is a great option for busy executives, and a must for PR pros.
• One of the best reasons as a corporation to have a twitter account is to have a channel to speak your voice, particularly when there are crisis communications.  For you old-timers, think how quickly a company like Tylenol could have reached its audience if twitter had been around in the 80s.  For you newcomers, think of crises like the US Air landing and how critical it is to get information out in as many channels as possible.  With social media platforms like twitter, you as a corporation can control the information.
• When you set up a twitter account you should truly identify yourself and let people and reporters know who you really are.  A cyrptic handle like ”Catperson12″ doesn’t really do it.
• You get to know reporters better by following them  on twitter than is possible the old-fashioned way of press tours. 
• “Citizen journalists” in which anyone and everyone can or report is the name of the game now.
• Twitter is a great way for CEOs to keep their personality and thought leadership. They should be the ones writing the tweets – no “ghosttweeting.”  Corporations also have to realize that you lose some control with this platform– you can’t have legal reviewing everything.   You also need to have someone working with the CEO to help monitor the responses to the tweets so that he or she can focus on running their business.
• Reporters today are looking to PR people to cover things they can’t cover themselves. They can’t be at every conference or meeting, so they rely on trusted PR sources (like Michelle Olson!) to provide them with that information.
• A good way to share information on twitter is to “retweet” what others have said.   The convention for this is “RT@ (the name of the twitterer)
• you may have seen the # mark in tweets – this is the way of tagging tweets so they are easier to search for later by category.
• There are different tweeting styles, including a) just being yourself and talking about whatever you want, b) creating your own brand, c) tweeting about your corporate brand (like Starbucks), d) aggregating news for others, and e) celebrities, like Shaquille O’Neal.  
• There is an immediacy to twitter and the ability to put it out there that enhances its value.

Some resources:

http://search.twitter.com – search capability by category

http://tinyurl.com – a way to post a really long link url in a condensed form – go to this website and paste in your long link and it automatically converts it to a shorter link

http://www.twitpic.com - the ability to post a picture

http://www.tweetdeck.com - an application that helps you organize all your tweets into different categories so that it is easier to scan them

http://ping.fm – a tool that lets you create your message once and update in all of your social media platforms. Limited to 140 characters, like twitter.   Note – your message has to be worthy of being in all those places (e.g. some twitter or Facebook updates are not appropriate for your LinkedIn profile).

 And hot off the press, PRSA Phoenix has a new twitter account and you can follow them now @phxprsa. 

 Thanks to Ryan Zuk (@ryanzuk) for a wonderful overview, and to Paula Pedene and Michelle Olson for coordinating the event.   And as always, I leave these meetings with juicy tidbits I didn’t know before — in this case, I found out that my teenage idol, Donny Osmond, @donnyosmond, now follows Abbie Fink @AbbieF.  

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