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Journalists using LinkedIn profiles to “vet” interviewees?

As I noted in my recent Online PR whitepaper, there are some novel digital twists occurring within traditional media relations. Take the good old journalist interview. In the past, a journalist would probably have to take at face value a bio provided by the PR person of a prospective interviewee.  On LinkedIn, although the background info provided by the person themselves might be of relevance, more value is to be had from what other people think of them ie LinkedIn recommendations.

Here is a practical example.  We began working with information risk management specialists ArmstrongAdams in December last year. Tim Kipps is ArmstrongAdams’ spokesperson on all issues related to information risk management and IT security.  Tim certainly knows his onions when it comes to his subject matter. However, another thing that I found very impressive were the huge number of recommendations he has on his LinkedIn profile (46). The frequency with which words and phrases like “expertise” and “high integrity” appear has certainly been reassuring to me that in terms of media interviews, we are putting forward someone who is clearly respected in his field and really does know what he is talking about.  And is trustworthy.  For journalists, that surely has to be a good thing.

It’s also a good thing for a PR too. It is easy to overlook the fact that a PR is often judged by the quality of the spokesperson he/she pitches to the media. Rightly or wrongly, a journalist may view a PR less favourably if the quality of interviewee they pitch is seen as sub-optimal. If both PR and client have a mutual interest in ensuring that only the most qualified and worthwhile spokespeople/interviewees are pitched to the media, then surely that too has to be a good thing.

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digital pr General PR online pr tech pr Technology PR Web/Tech

New free whitepaper will help PR and marketing professionals kick start or improve online PR programmes

Hot off the digital press today is a new whitepaper from Daryl Willcox Publishing entitled “Online PR in action – an introduction to implementing and measuring a digital PR programme.” I have a very personal interest in this – I wrote it. Within the confines of a 4000 word whitepaper, we’ve tried to make it as comprehensive as possible – but clearly, all feedback will be appreciated. Let the conversation begin (see below for press release):

PR and marketing professionals looking to kick start or improve their online communications programmes now have a valuable new free guide thanks to the publication today of the latest whitepaper from Daryl Willcox Publishing (DWPub). The whitepaper, entitled “Online PR in action – an introduction to implementing and measuring a digital PR programme”, sets out the basic steps required to get results from digital media. The whitepaper was written by digital PR veteran Andrew Bruce Smith, founder of online PR specialist consultancy escherman. It was inspired by a lack of detailed information about how to pull together all the various elements of a successful online PR campaign – despite huge volumes of information available on specific aspects of the subject.

According to Smith: “PR and marketing professionals are spoilt for choice when it comes to information available on niche features of online PR such as press release distribution or search engine optimisation (SEO). It occurred to me that much of this material was being produced by search marketing specialists rather than PR practitioners. And no one had really put together a practical guide that looked at the subject from the perspective of the PR professional – whether in-house or agency – as well as looking at the entire PR process from planning through implementation to analysis and reporting. This new whitepaper aims to provide a solid framework for allowing PR professionals from SMEs to larger businesses to begin making rapid improvements to their online PR campaigns.”

DWPub chairman Daryl Willcox said: “There are tons of people out there blogging about how important online PR is, but there is very little in terms of actual guidance – especially for those who have limited online PR experience. This latest whitepaper seeks to address that imbalance and give people a practical introduction to digital PR techniques.” In the whitepaper’s foreword, Willcox warns that if PR professionals do not adapt to an increasingly digital media, they risk being sidelined by other marketing disciplines. Willcox first made this prediction in his 2007 whitepaper entitled “PR versus Search” – a forecast that is showing signs of coming true. “Online PR in action” is the latest in the Public Relations Whitepaper Series from DWPub which covers such topics as press release writing, getting coverage in feature articles and working with freelance journalists.

All the whitepapers can be downloaded at www.dwpub.com/whitepapers

Online services from DWPub, such as its media database and online press release distribution services, are effective tools for supporting online PR campaigns.

For more information contact:

Vanessa McGreevy

Daryl Willcox Publishing

Tel: 0845 370 7777

Email: vanessa@dwpub.com

Andrew Smith Escherman

Tel: 0208 334 8095

andrew@escherman.com

About Daryl Willcox Publishing

Online services for journalists and media relations specialists www.dwpub.com Daryl Willcox Publishing (DWPub) focuses entirely on online information services for journalists and PR professionals. DWPub brands enjoy widespread recognition with both the press and the PR community. DWPub is a UK-owned independent company and has grown every year since its launch in 1997. The company was founded and is run by an experienced journalist.

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digital pr General PR online pr tech pr Technology PR

Jack Schofield at The Guardian bullies hapless PR blogger

That’s the headline (sort of) that Guardian Technology Editor Charles Arthur suggested I use. As regular readers may have noticed, this blog has had a theme redesign. And Jack Schofield is the reason. Last Friday evening, whilst indulging in a bit of Twitter banter, Jack pointed out that he thought my previous blog theme was difficult to read. And having looked at it again, I decided I agreed with him. A few minutes of poking around the available themes on WordPress and I came up with this one. It is simple, clean – and most importantly, readable. And Jack gave his thumbs up.

An example of how PR can react quickly to journalist feedback in the modern world.

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Books digital pr General PR marketing online pr tech pr Technology PR

Wittgenstein’s Poker: Why defining social media and PR won’t solve its problems

For those of a philosophic bent, one of the best books of recent times has been Wittgenstein’s Poker, by David Edmonds and John Eidinow, which provides a brilliant overview of two giants of 20th century thought, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper. (The title derives from the infamous meeting of Wittgenstein and Popper in room H3, King’s College Cambridge on 25th October 1946 when Wittgenstein allegedly brandished a hot poker at Popper over a fundamental philosophical disagreement.

The dispute between Wittgenstein and Popper represents the major clash of philosophical opinion in the 20th century. In simple terms (if that is possible), Wittgenstein felt that philosophical problems were merely puzzles caused by the misuse of language. By analysing our use of language properly, we would dissolve away the issues. Popper violently disagreed with this view. For him, there were real problems, not mere puzzles that could be just explained away by language analysis. For Popper, Wittgenstein’s theories were the equivalent of intellectual navel gazing. And he was backed up in this by Bertrand Russell (who ironically was one of Wittgenstein’s early supporters). As Edmonds and Eidinow describe: “Russell had pioneered the analysis of concepts, and, like Popper, thought that this could often clarify issues. But also like Popper he believed precision was not the be-all and end-all. Popper pointed out that scientists managed to accomplish great things despite working with a degree of linguistic ambiguity. Russell averred that problems would not disappear even if each word were carefully defined.

By way example, Russell used the following anecdote. He was cycling to Winchester and stopped to ask a shopkeeper the shortest way. The shopkeeper called to a man in the back of the premises:

“Gentleman wants to know the shortest way to Winchester”

“Winchester?” an unseen voice replied.

“Aye.”

“Way to Winchester?”

“Aye.”

“Shortest way?”

Aye.

“Dunno”

The connection with today’s social media and PR world is that I keep seeing a lot of Socratic questions being asked eg What is PR? What is social media? The underlying implication being that if we could simply define what social media and PR are then we are well on the way to promised land. However, I’m with Popper and Russell. We can spend our time defining terms all we like – the problems to be solved won’t go away. Namely, how can we best solve client’s marketing and PR problems for them in a profitable manner. Continuing to obsess over definitions isn’t going to help.

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Books digital pr General PR marketing online pr tech pr Technology PR Web/Tech

“Should I kill myself or read another Twitter message?”: Camus’ question for the social media generation

The above quote is a reworking of Albert “The Outsider” Camus’ existentialist poser: “Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?” It is referred to in Barry Schwartz’s highly insightful cult classic, The Paradox of Choice to stress the point that everything in life is a choice. One of the key themes in Schwartz’s book is that although having no choice at all is a bad thing, having an ever expanding growth in choice isn’t leading us to the promised land either.

In other words, choice overload is an even more serious problem them information overload. And choice overload is clearly in abundance in the world of PR, marketing and social media – whether it is the range of marketing channels available (and ways in which these can be combined), or the number of 3rd party agencies and suppliers queuing up to offer their services to the deluged client side buyers.

As Schwartz says: “Filtering out extraneous information is one of the basic functions of consciousness. If everything available to our senses demanded our attention at all times, we wouldn’t be able to get through the day.” (He has clearly never used Twitter).

We are becoming trapped by what economist Fred Hirch has referred to as “the tyranny of small decisions” (or in social media terms, the Tyranny of the Twitter Stream or the infinitely expanding Google Reader RSS subscription list). According to Clay Shirky, there is no such thing as information overload, merely “filter failure.” If that is true, then we just need to build better filters. But presumably building better filters requires us to be more clear and decisive about our goals. And as Schwartz fascinatingly points out: “Goal setting and decision making begins with the question, ‘What do I want?”. But knowing what we want means being able to anticipate accurately how one choice or another will make us feel, and that is no easy task.” A number of experiments cited show that our predictions about how we will feel about our goal making decisions are usually wrong. “Susceptibility to error can only get worse as the number and complexity of decisions increase, which in general describes the conditions of daily life. The growth of options and opportunities for choice has three, related unfortunate effects:

It means that decisions require more effort

It makes mistakes more likely

It makes the psychological consequences of mistakes more severe

Another key element of the book is the distinction between people who are maximisers and satisficers. “Choosing wisely begins with developing a clear understanding of your goals. And the first choice you must make is between the goal of choosing the absolute best and the goal of choosing something that is good enough”.

If you seek and accept only the best, you are a maximiser. Maximisers need to be “assured that every decision was the best that could be made. Yet how can anyone truly know that any given option is absolutely the best possible? The only way is to check out all the alternatives. As a decision strategy, maximising creates a daunting task, which becomes all the more daunting as the number of options increases.”

Take some social media examples. A Twitter maximiser will presumably keep following more people and reading more Tweets in order to reassure themselves they have found the absolute best in terms of Twitterers and material. They will click every link they can to make sure they haven’t missed that vital blog post or news story. Or what about a client side PR director who in order to reassure themselves they have chosen the right agency will keep adding to the pitch list until they have 20 agencies lined up (as Schwartz points out, the more alternatives you consider the more likely you are to suffer from buyer’s remorse and still feel disatisfied with your decision – he cites a number of experiments which seem to verify this principle – at last, scientific proof of the ineffectiveness of lengthy pitch lists!) He has a lot more to say on maximisers, but one of the key conclusions is that maximisers tend to be unhappier people – and unhappy people tend to be poor decision makers.

Contrast this with “satisficers”. To satisfice is to settle for something that is “good enough” and not worry about the possibility that there might be something better. A satisficer has criteria and standards. He or she will search until they find the item (whatever it is) that meets those standards and at that point stop. They are not concerned that a better alternative might be just around the corner.

I could go on, but I’m making a decision to stop now and go and do something else instead. Suffice to say there is a lot be learnt from The Paradox of Choice – and I shall return to it again in later blog posts.

So. Should I follow yet another person on Twitter? Spend another few minutes on Tweetdeck? Or kill myself? Or go an re-read some Camus?

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digital pr General PR online pr Science tech pr Technology PR

Five tips for a healthier social network: New Scientist on “social contagion”

According to the latest issue of New Scientist, recent research shows that our moods are more strongly influenced by those around us than we tend to think. Not only that but we are also “beholden to the moods of friends of friends, and of friends of friends of friends – people three degrees of separation away from us who we have never met, but whose disposition can pass through our social network like a virus.” In short, we are who we hang out with.

No surprises there you may think. However, Michael Bond’s excellent article shows that maths and hard data are being deployed in a wide range of areas to reveal some curious aspects of how social networks of all varieties seem to work (it is well worth the effort to read the full feature).

According to Bond: “a whole range of phenomena are transmitted through networks of friends in ways that are not entirely understood: happiness and depression, obesity, drinking and smoking habits, ill-health, the inclination to turn out and vote in elections, a taste for certain music or food, a preference for online privacy, even the tendency to attempt or think about suicide. They ripple through networks “like pebbles thrown into a pond”, says Nicholas Christakis, a medical sociologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, who has pioneered much of the new work.”

Later in the piece he continues: “While the mechanism of social contagion varies depending on the phenomenon being spread, in many cases the dynamics are very similar. For example, Christakis has found that with happiness, obesity and smoking habits, the effect of other people’s behaviour carries to three degrees of separation and no further. He speculates that this could be the case with most or perhaps all transmissible traits. Why three degrees? One theory is that friendship networks are inherently unstable because peripheral friends tend to drop away. “While your friends are likely to be the same a year from now, your friends of friends of friends of friends are likely to be entirely different people,” says Christakis.

And perhaps in an even more telling section, Bond reveals that: “Sociologists and others are using mathematical models to test these dynamics to try to understand better what triggers the spread of behaviours. Duncan Watts at Columbia University has shown that seeding localised social groups with certain ideas or behaviours can lead to the ideas cascading across entire global networks. This contradicts the notion – promoted by the author Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point and others – that social epidemics depend on a few key influential individuals from whom everyone else takes their cue. It doesn’t ring true, argues Watts, because such “influentials” typically interact with only a few people. The key for the spread of anything, he says, from happiness to the preference for a particular song, is a critical mass of interconnected individuals who influence one another.”

All of this clearly has major implications for social media and online PR. It may be argued that most PR is an attempt to influence or “trigger” certain kinds of behaviour (ie buy my client’s message or product). I have to say I never ever did accept Gladwell’s theory of a few key individals acting as “gatekeepers.” And research now seems to be bearing this out. And what if three degrees of separation is shown to be a universal “influence limit?”

Having a greater understanding of the dynamics of social network behaviour and as well as what constitutes the “critical mass” of interconnected individuals for a given client goal or situation is surely going to be a key objective for any savvy digital PR specialist in 2009.

When my mom was just beginning to have trouble sleeping (insomnia) and various herbs and Ambien tablets on their basis did not help, I turned to the familiar pharmacists for advice, what else can my mother take with this problem.

And on that note, have a look at Michael Bond’s top five tips for a healthier social network (applying this to the realm of social media, it offers a useful framework for who (and how much time) you spend with people…)

Michael Bond, New Scientist: Five tips for a healthier social network

1. Choose your friends carefully.

2. Choose which of your existing friends you spend the most time with. For example, hang out with people who are upbeat, or avoid couch potatoes.

3. Join a club whose members you would like to emulate (running, healthy cooking), and socialise with them.

4. If you are with people whose emotional state or behaviours you could do without, try to avoid the natural inclination to mimic their facial expressions and postures.

5. Be aware at all times of your susceptibility to social influence – and remember that being a social animal is mostly a good thing.

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The business of PR – part two

(Note: this post first appeared here on May 16th, 2005)

I’ve been enjoying Michael O’Connor Clarke’s Seven Deadly Agency Types – not least because he clearly speaks from experience – and it reflects a lot of what I have seen myself over the years.

His current analysis is of large, multi-national PR firms – I’ve highlighted some his comments below and added my own commentary.

A key part of the value proposition these behemoths offer to clients is the apparent advantage of homogenous, fully integrated PR representation in every region you might want to operate. The promise is that you’ll be able to get the same quality of service, the same methods, the same reporting tools, and complete coordination of all activity wherever you need PR.

The key word here is “promise” – in reality, even the PR firms themselves would acknowledge in private that they can’t offer the same quality of service everywhere – by definition, some agencies have better people and better experience in some things rather than others – or the pool of local PR talent is just not applicable to every client. For example, the German agency may have a great reputation for handling telecom work, but no experience of enterprise software – however, the promise is that everyone, everywhere will be able to provide the same quality of delivery. In fact, in most cases, the clients know this too – however, they want to believe it is true – and there are other motivating factors for their decision to go with this kind of approach – more on this below.

You have finite marketing resources. If you’re like most companies, your PR dollars probably represent a relatively small portion of your marketing budget. And your marketing budget these days is, no doubt, considerably lower than it might have been in the crazy days of the mid 90s. Your mid-sized budget for agency services now has to be split somehow between two or more different offices – each office bearing the same brand identity, but each of them running on their own individual P&L and productivity targets. What might have been a decent size of retainer for one firm, suddenly becomes a lot less attractive when it’s chopped up. If, like most clients in this situation, you opt for something like a 70/30 or 80/20 split – one of the offices is going to find it tough to justify hauling themselves out of bed to service your account for the fractional budget portion they’re getting. For the good of the firm, they’ll probably agree internally to handle you as an investment account – hoping the budget will grow as they deliver great results for you. The reality is, you’re still going to get short shrift.

This is the another dirty little secret of international PR networks – as described above, most of the agencies are doing this as a “favour” to the lead agency (either in the US or UK). By any rational business analysis, the work they are expected to do does not justify the amount they are being paid – however, they do it for the “good of the network” – but the account teams who have to burn the midnight oil for these loss leaders don’t quite see it that way. The fact is that domestic PR work accounts for the vast majority of agency income even in big international networks. Which leads to another PR paradox. The agency people who get the best out of international agency networks are those that are prepared to spend time with their counterparts in other countries and do unpaid “favours” for each other – ie the French agency has a client in London for a few days and wants a few press meeting setting up – however, they have a miniscule budget – UK agency does it on the basis that they may need to call upon the French for a favour some time. When a big international client has a particularly demanding campaign, the guy in London with the most favours in the bank can get his international colleagues to play ball – when under any other circumstances they’d laugh till they cried.

The paradox is – the person who puts in this extra unbilled time to elicit this relationship doesn’t get any thanks for it – in fact he/she probably gets a ticking off for not pulling in any revenue for this unbilled time – even though they are trying harder than anyone to making the international network concept work.

It’s entirely natural that big clients are gravitationally attracted to big PR firms. In a trend that has paralleled the ongoing consolidation in the agency world, many Global 1000 organizations have been moving to centralize their agency relationships. For a multi-billion dollar company, with operations in fifteen or so countries – appointing a single global agency of record just seems to make good business sense. Certainly, the alternative approach – individual agencies selected on merit in each region or for each business unit – can tend to look messy.

What is often forgotten is the real driving factor behind going with a single agency network. Having a single rear end to kick is certainly one element of this – also, some clients don’t actually consider results as their main priority – they are more bothered about the process – and making sure they have something in place to cover themselves if things don’t work out.

Big global clients may think they’re being smart by signing a single contract with one of the top tier shops, but I’ve seen many, many examples where a head office mandate to use the same agency everywhere in the world has ended up causing horrendous problems for individual regional offices.

The real problems occur here when the decision to go with a single agency is taken centrally with no consultation with the company’s local organisations. Those on the ground who have probably been working with their own local PR agency very happily are told they have to drop them and work with a bunch of people they had no hand in choosing and who they don’t know from Adam. Human nature suggests that resentment is built into the relationship from the start. The new agency spends most of its time trying to deal with people who bitterly resent them being there in the first place – so even when the agency might be quite good, they end up spending inordinate amounts of time just trying to placate their local clients rather than actually trying to do any work for them.
And please, don’t tell me your award-winning global intranet solves the inter-office communication problems. Even with the most sophisticated networked communications infrastructure, how much of your budget do you really want to see chewed up by staff keeping up to date with what everyone else on the account has been doing for you lately. There’s better ways to skin that cat.

Award-winning global intranets are either:

a) Vapourware – if the client ever asked to see the thing in action as opposed to the slide about it at the pitch, they might be in trouble

b) Crapware – some of the most god awful intranets every built are those that big agency networks have tried to put in place – in fact, they’d all make great case studies for how not build an application – hopeless design specs, inappropriate software development staff, total lack of user input, etc.

Lets face it, most international agency internal communiation is done by a weekly telephone conference call which never gets 100pc attendance. Or every agency submits a Word document which some poor sap at the hub has to try and consolidate into one completely unusable report.

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The PR demographic timebomb

Two years ago, I posted a note about a survey of junior PR folk, conducted in December 2006, that showed a “staggering” (PR Week’s own word) 80pc of them were planning to leave the industry within 10 years. 15pc said they would get out after only 1 or 2 years, with 32pc saying they’d exit in 2 – 5. A further 27pc said they might remain in PR for between 5 and 10 years.

At the time, PRCA director-general Patrick Barrow also conceded that the traditional PR agency model puts “disproportionate pressure on those at the bottom of the heap.”

In that same post, I quoted survey results that showed that middle management level PRs – average age 35 and 41 for consultancy and in-house staff respectively – were those most likely to quit their jobs in the next 2 to 3 years.

In the light of the kerfuffle over Dennis Howlett’s recent Nietzschean style “PR is dead” post, I was wondering if there was any more recent data on any of the above. If that first survey was correct, we should already have seen 15pc of the recruits from 2006 exiting the industry. I haven’t seen any figures to suggest any decline in the numbers of PRs employed – so either the exodus never happened or the 15pc have simply been replaced with a new crop of joiners. Clearly the disproportionate pressures on those at the bottom are set to rise in the current economic environment. Overservicing is rife and will no doubt be further exacerbated. Which suggests perhaps that more young PR folk are likely to jump the ship. And has there been an exodus of 35 – 41 year olds in the last two years?

If experience and expertise are needed to solve Dennis Howlett’s problems with PR, then we can only hope the demographic trends revealed in these surveys two years ago are going to go in reverse.

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More tips on supercharging your PR efforts with Twitter (a case study in open source PR)

Stephen Davies at PR Blogger is turning into a one man Twitter PR resource at the moment. And perhaps providing a useful case study in open source PR.

Last Friday, he posted his initial list of UK journalists on Twitter – thus sparking a healthy dose of comments from both PRs and hacks. Including some very useful tips for PRs in terms of how best to work with journalists on Twitter (see below).

And now Andrew Girdwood from Bigmouthmedia (the guys behind the 79 out of top 100 UK PR agencies don’t offer online services survey) has created an RSS feed that amalgamates all the public Tweets from Stephen’s list of UK journalists. As Andrew points out, having this kind of RSS feed is useful because: “you want to see what these journalists are tweeting just in case you’ve got a useful response handy, but you may also want to avoid adding dozens of people you don’t know very well to your Twitter follow list. It’s also possible that journalists don’t fancy having a bunch of strangers all rock up as brand new Twitter followers.”

And if that wasn’t enough, Stephen has now released a list of UK PR people on Twitter.

That’s a lot of useful PR innovation in the space of three days (two of which were a Saturday and Sunday).

Free and openly available PR resources that once made available inspire others to create other useful tools. If that can be achieved in three days, what can we expect in a week or a month’s time? Now that’s what I call the power of open source PR.

Journalist tips for PRs on using Twitter

Kat Hannaford at T3: (likes frozen peas, the Smiths, and ketjap manis sauce)

“I’ve got to say on the whole, I don’t mind too much when PRs follow me on Twitter – particularly if

-I know them
-if they are at an agency I’m aware of
-have clients who are relevant to what I write about.

As I only have limited time, and am trying to trim Twitter down a little, I only follow PRs back if at least two of those boxes are checked. And of course, a proper Twitter dialogue (and relationship) can only proceed if both parties follow one another – in which case, it just turns into me being unaware of your brand, and you peeking at 140-word descriptions of my private life.

I’ve had a couple of bad experiences on Twitter with PRs (people trying to push their releases onto me, people spamming me every ten minutes with their @replies and so on), but the worst experiences have actually been with other journalists – who generally don’t seem to understand Twitter (and its benefits) as most PRs, and spend their time peddling links to their dry-as-stale-bread posts. And arguing with me. And pleading for freelance from me. And generally being knobs.”
Linda Jones, Passionate Media:

“I don’t mind if PR people want to follow me on Twitter, and I am keen to hear from them IF they have relevant information that could be helpful in my work, I put together a list of current projects and have tweeted a link to it. I hope this may be useful for me in that I need to find case studies, expert comment and news of relevant organisations etc and I am looking in lots of other places apart from from PR people.

I can’t see that there would be any difference contacting me or ‘pitching’ me by Twitter as from any other means. So long as it’s done well then that’s okay. If you are a PR person following me on Twitter (and a few have signed up since reading this post) please take the time to find out about the work I do before you get in touch by Twitter or any other means.

If you feel that work by any of your clients could genuinely fit with what I’m writing about then please get in touch. Ultimately, for me, it’s not the means of keeping in touch that matters but the story. Don’t push me on stuff you have tweeted to all and sundry but please do think about if there’s anything specific that may be of interest according to the list of current projects I have gone to the trouble of preparing.”

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6 reasons to supercharge your PR efforts with Twitter

Stephen Davies has posted a great list of prominent UK journalists who are on Twitter.

As he says: “Twitter isn’t something that immediately strikes you as anything good and explaining the benefits of it to someone who has never heard of it – particularly a pressed for time PR person – can be quite difficult.”

OK. Here’s my current top 6 reasons to use Twitter to supercharge you PR efforts:

1. Look at the numbers – as per Stephen’s list, many more journalists are using it. Not only that, but some journalists are giving priority to communication via Twitter over any other channel. For example, I’m willing to bet that you are far more likely to get the attention of someone like, say, Charles Arthur at the Guardian, by sending him a direct Tweet and/or a link to a dedicated info landing page than by trying to call him or e-mail him. Of course, you still need a good story, but I suspect he would give you more respect for using this approach.

2. It is much easier now to manage the Twitter info firehose because of tools like Tweetdeck. Being able to keep real time tabs on specific brands/issues/people is fantastic. The kind of insight you could only have dreamed of in the past.

3. People are beginning to develop their own individual styles of Twitter usage. Smart PRs will adapt their approach depending on the various Twitter “communities” they participate in (I can now see why having separate accounts for certain things makes sense eg having a dedicated client press release account so you can separate this from more general Twittering).

4. The 140 character limit imposes a healthy discipline on communicating clearly and succinctly.

5. Lets not forget the journalist research aspect of Twitter – checking out a journalist’s recent Tweets gives great insight into the kind of things they are really interested in.

6. Being there when you can’t be there – if you can’t get to an event, you can be sure that someone on Twitter will be – and will provide useful updates and commentary on proceedings – not only that, if they are journalists, you can feed them questions that might be worth asking….

The drug has removed nervous tension and panic attacks, calmed me down and clarified the mind. Side effects are described at https://careanimalrights.org/xanax-2mg/ but I haven’t felt any.

I think the excuses for not using Twitter are dwindling by the day. The only way to really understand Twitter is to dive in and use it. What are you waiting for?