Where Do You Stand?

Twitter has been the discussion EVERYWHERE as of late, including the Standing Partnership lunch room. One of my colleagues who shall remain nameless challenged me to provide him with thoughts about Twitter’s usefulness.

BusinessWeek’s Stephen Baker is currently writing a story on the growth of Twitter as a business tool … in 140 character chunks ON TWITTER! Why is this useful? For PR professionals, it proves that the media is accessible beyond our old school media lists and telephone books. With over 600 people following Baker’s story, it illustrates the fairly-accepted notion that journalism is moving beyond the print methods of yesteryear.

Industry-based conversation takes place at all hours on Twitter, from searching for an SEO expert to social media best practices. Many prominent bloggers, who are often inappropriately pitched via their blog, also use Twitter and often report when they’re spammed (because truly, 90 percent of “blogger outreach” is spam) by a public relations person trying to get them to peddle products unrelated to their blogs’ content. A group of public relations practitioners (myself included) have taken it upon ourselves to debunk the myth that all of us are spin-doctors reaching out to anyone and everyone for a hit. By putting ourselves out there, and allowing our personalities to be known, we can show that we are people too, and we may be more relatable than just another nameless product pusher.

Personally, I have been using Twitter for nearly a year now; hardly a first adopter but not exactly a new adopter. I have 158 followers and I follow 138 others. Yesterday, one of my Twitter followers, DtotheK told me that I was the top St. Louis area Tweeter according to TwitterLocal. Recently I had some concert tickets stolen, and upon learning of it, one of my followers told me that through his connections, he could help me replace them should I not be able to replace them using traditional channels. Twitter connected me to someone who made my life just that much easier.

What’s next? I’m betting my skeptical coworker will be on Twitter within the month. With Twitter-based love connections, business deals virtually inked in 140 words or less and at least one marriage proposal occurring via the microblogging site, anything is possible.

If you’d like to follow me on Twitter, look for me as one of the top Tweeters from TwitterLocal’s St. Louis feed.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 1:06 pm and is filed under Social Media, Where We Stand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.