Twitter -Twits, tweets and twats...

As the weeks go by, the microblogging site Twitter gets more and more press coverage. It's well past a tipping point now in the UK, we're in full blown commercialism!

I think its fascinating how quickly the media and public relations sectors have adopted to this highly useful social media tool. Obviously digital media journalists would be first to try out such a new technology, but I think the speed at which public relations pracitioners have jumped on the bandwagon is to the industries credit. I know alot of people in the industry, myself included, have been using it for a year or more, but its great how this flood of PRs has been joined by a flood of journalists, journalists who now accept a tweet as a valid method of communication. It really has changed the game of pitching. The Guardian's Charles Arthur welcomes pitches via tweets saying, "it's good - more direct, more quickly dealt with, less distracting than a phone call". (Sorry if this leads to an influx Charles - it might cut down the annoying phone calls!).

Twitter is now flooded with 'social media evangelists', 'web 2.0 gurus' and the like. There is though, real opportunity to provide business value for your clients by carefully sifting through the large amounts of sicophantic, narcissitic BS. I'm not going to spell out how for free, because thats the stuff other agencies are just thousands to reveal to their clients.

Over the last month I've been getting my clients involved more in social media and I'm now getting bored of the phrase. Has anyone else got any other suggestions for what we can call it? Web 2.0 actually makes me heave, so thats a no-go too. Bobbie Johnson at The Guardian wrote about a similar topic recently.

This might sound like a petulant whim, but I think its currently important to distinguish the difference between print, digital and social media until we (as an industry) can get our clients to fully understand the individual merits of coverage in each. One thing is clear, there is no single golden rule to how you should carry out a social media project with your client - it was always be adaptive and different.

With this in mind, it made me smirk when I read on the PR Week website that Escherman is claiming that a new guide it has produced, "can help businesses to 'dramatically improve online PR campaign effectiveness'." Pardon me for being a little sceptical about this and its REAL effectiveness....

To end this post I'm going to hand over to Hermione Way and the Techfluff.tv team. I wasn't able to attend Twestival last week, I bought the ticket, got the t-shirt, but on the day it became clear I wouldn't get there in time, maybe next time?

Here's the Techfluff crew: