Drew B's take on tech PR

A guide to Twitter: 10 ways Twitter is useful for a PR practitioner

It's over two years now since my first impressions of Twitter as a communications tool got scribbled down... (and woo got picked up by the press and online here and there). Now a day does not pass without a mainstream TV channel featuring Twitter. It's become the new black amongst the mainstream. So it's probably a good time to do a review, based on my experiences and those of others, of what value Twitter holds for the PR practitioner.

1. Researching. Track issues on Twitter just by searching on http://search.twitter.com for your topic. You'll see stuff happening live, reported by the people seeing it first hand. It might be an event, a global isue, or a viral spreading. You can also find people that are into specialist areas - you might be a manufacturer of non-drip tea pots, and you'll find all those people who are teapot geeks twittering away on Twitter. They might also be bloggers, podcasters, manufacturers or journalists. Twitter's a window into other online worlds, not just a network of its own. 
2. Networking. Find people you know or who you would like to know and Twitter's a great way of networking with them online. You can help a journalist with a story, find common interests with industry peers, and see who's going to what events so that you can network better in real life. Just make sure you follow all the right people. Twitter lets you do this by uploading your address book, searching, or seeing your friends' friends.
3. Promoting. If you are doing the PR for a product that people would like to follow news about, then get it up on Twitter. Companies of all shapes and sized promote what they do on Twitter. There's an etiquette to it, so don't spam. But get a feel for the Twitter community and roll with it. Try typing a few brand names into Twitter Search and you'll get an idea. Sites like TwitterFeed will convert RSS into Tweets for you to help automate things if you think that's the right way to go, and FriendFeed is good for this too.
4. Team working. Why not put all your team on Twitter and see how it changes the way you communicate. You'll notice email overload eases up, and things become a bit more social. We've done it here at number 33 for a while now and it's great (I would say that though).
5. News broadcasting. Twitter is not just a messaging system, it's broadcast too. A lot of people read their news feeds over Twitter (me included). All the major news channels broadcast over Twitter. So figure out how you might be able to do the same and try it out.
6. Story testing. If you have an idea, try it out on your Twitter friends. It's called crowdsourcing. You'll find the instant feedback makes your idea better in the end. Or if you need help on a story, ask over Twitter. You might need an extra spokesperson from a complementary brand, and Twitter's your window into other places so that you don't need to know precisely where to look before you start digging.
7. Search engine optimising. If you Google the name of a brand or a spokesperson, you'll find the Twitter page for that thing appears very high up in Google. Small and large firms alike have their Twitter page very high up their Google results. So if your client wants good control of what's up there, Twitter's a no-brainer.
8. Crisis management. When the shit hits the proverbial, then watch Twitter for developments, issue alerts through your corporate Twitter stream, and you'll find that a mixture of listening and responding fits well with the broader crisis plan.
9. Selling news. Some journalists or bloggers might prefer you contact them through Twitter. If so, do it. It's not for everyone, but it's growing in adoption. You can either 'direct message' your contact or '@' them with a story. If they know you and trust you, then this system works well at cutting information overload.
10. Recruiting. If you need help on a project, ask Twitter. You might find your contacts pass your message on even further. Whether you need some specialist help, a new full time recruit, or whatever, try using your network. We do it a lot here.

If you need a hand getting a foot up on the Twitter machine, just let us know. There are hundreds of guides online that will help too, if you need them. Plus this one now. :)

The rise of the digital assistant

One story that is getting talked about online a lot today is a digital trends predictions story by IBM, where they look at what will be the big innovations in the next five years. It's interesting to note that digital shopping assistants is up there in the top five. As is 'talking to the web and the web talking back'. Combining these two and we might see some examples of commerce beginning to innovate in the same way the social web has done in the last few years. I know it's a tech venor's views, but interesting stuff to read in any case.

PR blog and industry updates

Some news and updates from the PR blogging world from my RSS reader. 

• Edelman's Trust barometer came out today in case you didn't see it. Go have a look - there are some good stats
• The Friendly Ghost Brendan Cooper, who last year moved from Porter Novelli to Fleishman Hillard, has moved on to Metia to be a strategist there
• My esteemed colleague Giles has recently started blogging over at The Media Barron
• Some new blogs I've recently subscribed to include...
• The PR-Media-Blog by Staniforth and TBWA
• Rock Star PR by Wolfstar's Jed Hallam
• PR Now and Then by independent PR consultant Katie Rocket 

All worth subscribing to. That's it for now. :)

Russell Brand aka RustyRockets reinvents Twitter

Twitter got a boot up the backside this evening as Russell Brand entered the world of Twitter.

I first saw it when a colleague, journalist and industry peer all mentioned that @rustyrockets had set up a Twitter account but hadn't yet posted. I clicked on the link and, lo an behold, a tweet. And 800 followers. Not bad going for a new account, even from a celeb like BRand (who you might say would be more Twitter than Wossy, Stephen Fry or Schofe).

Then I check back a minute later and he has 1,300 followers. Wha!? 500 new follows in a minute? (by the time I finished writing this post, it is at 1,898)

So I plug his tag into the Twitter search engine and find he is being mentioned across the web dozens of times per second.

I've not seen Twitter accounts grow this quick ever. It doesnt take a rocket scientist to see that Mr Rusty Rockets is about to redefine Twitter.

[Update - my post got picked up by Jack Schofield for an article on the Rusty Rocketeer in The Guardian]

Here are some screen grabs of everything in action:

Rusty in his infancy, 11pm tonight:

And here's 70-odd mentions in less than a minute:

The Brits bring down Twitter for the first time. Mainstream media coverage glut surprises the tech geeks

Last night the exiled Jonathan Ross returned to his prime time TV slot on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross. One of his special guests was Stephen Fry and as you may know, those two celebs are two of the highest profile Twitter users in the UK. So it was no surprise when they chose to bring up the topic of Twitter on the show last night. Here's the clip for you to see in all its glory. 

I woke up this morning to see Twitter being covered on BBC Breakfast news, in The Telegraph and all over the internetz. The web is alight with Twitter's new found mainstreamhood (look! new word!). And Twitter as a system is straining just a little. Could it be? Are mainstream people flooding to Twitter? Who knows. 

But as you'd expect, the traffic floods to Twitter after a succinct flood of coverage in the media in the UK and it cracks under the pressure. Twitter users are right now reporting glitches in some of the core functions, like following (it's quite funny, thought, that the American tech geeks are completely unaware of the reason why. Jonathan Ross? TV? Newspaper??). Twitter glitches happen whenever something major occurs in the media that sends too much traffic to the Twitter system. Recently Twitter broke at Obama's inauguration and at Apple's most recent product launches at Macworld. I just like that its now a bit of British telly that's giving Twitter a run for its money. And perhaps bringing Twitter into the mainstream (properly). 

As ITV's Ben Ayers said last night, even Facebook never managed such levels of endorsement from big name stars (as far as he knows :)

Wikipedia to change permissions on fact changing in light of net 'vandalism'

Managing a brand's coverage on Wikipedia to ensure it's all on the mark is something we do a lot of here at number 33. To do that you need to know the rules and the community's ways. And so it's important to point out some changes coming from Wikipedia. The New York Times says in an article out yesterday that "Wikipedia appears ready to introduce a system that prevents new and anonymous users from instantly publishing changes to the online encyclopedia." It's in light of vandals changing facts on 'important' Wikipedia entries. 

Something to be aware of, as it may mean Wikipedia editing is carried out more by a smaller number of people in the future, and for the more important changes, seasoned users will be called on to do the business. 

"The ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries"

Like most people in the universe I watched Barack Obama's inauguration yesterday, the whole event seeming strangely momentous. Strangely because I never thought it would bring the whole world to a standstill like it did.

Barack's got some impressive stuff whirring away behind the scenes: his genius speech writer is just 27 and according to media profiles yesterday is like the Obama whisperer or something; and his web team are bang on with nearly everything they do, from licensing content under Creative Commons to launching a social media architected Whitehouse.gov site yesterday without any glitches.

Listening to Obama's speech yesterday, it seemed he dedicated a lot of attention to the environment and change for energy. One passage he delivered jumped out at me so much I had to write it down: "The ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries... We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. " How powerful a way is that of saying there's a need to go green.

We're seeing so much energy tech innovation right now, it's going to be interesting to see that part of the president's manifesto play out.

How journalists use Wikipedia for researching their articles

This is just a one-off I'm sure, but I suspect a large number of articles written for print, online and social media are researched using Wikipedia. The below is an important reminder for all of us to manage our Wikipedia profiles so that when the media does its homework for that next article, it's all based on fact and not fiction. 

I just saw that this article in The Times on the top 50 young football players included an entire profile in the top 50 of a player researched by the writer on Wikipedia - who doesn't even exist in real life. The profile reads: 

30. Masal Bugduv (Olimpia Balti)
Moldova's finest, the 16-year-old attacker has been strongly linked with a move to Arsenal, work permit permitting. And he's been linked with plenty of other top clubs as well

The non-existent player was given a bogus write-up on Wikipedia as some kind of joke or experiment. It ended up being quite some PR coup. Perhaps an agent could make some dosh getting him signed.

How Twitter broke and covered the Hudson plane crash tonight, from eyewitnesses

Here's an example of the speed of Twitter. This evening first hand and eyewitness reports started coming into me through Twitter that a plane had come down on the Hudson River in New York. It seemed it crash landed in the river straight after taking off. Twitter's buzz of this disaster was pretty quick. Only about an hour after the crash happened everyone on Twitter seemed to be talking about it. 

Chatter included:  

ginabenning I just witnessed a plane go down in the Hudson River from my living room window. This is surreal people have been rescued by NY finest.

kevglobal omg. some tweets from people who are eyewitness to a plane crash in the Hudson river. http://bit.ly/8w9y (via @christinelu) 

Scobleizer When I started watching Twitter search for "plane" it was getting two tweets every 10 seconds. Now? 200 every 10 seconds. Wow.

dbarefoot Here's a photo of the crashed US Airways plane from Flickr: http://tr.im/usairwayscrash

kevglobal Still "don't get" Twitter? Enter "Hudson" or "Airways" into http://search.twitter.com/ right now. Brace for bad news; plane crash.

If you want to track what people are saying about the crash on Twitter right now, try using this link. 

Channel 4's aspirations of killing every fan... my story

Yesterday I received an email saying that Channel 4 has requested my video be removed from YouTube. I was trying to spread buzz online about something I liked, but they ordered me not to and deleted my content. It got me thinking about online publicity, content ownership, and word of mouth. I started wondering why on earth Channel 4 would do such a thing, and I ended up feeling, unnecessarily, like I hate Channel 4. Here's what happened.

Two nights ago a snippet on Celebrity Big Brother made me chuckle, so I wanted to share it with my social network. It was a clip of the middle-aged gobby scouser Tina Malone, the one off Shameless, explaining her views on the internet.

So I recorded the clip on my mobile to send to YouTube. Publishing it online to Twitter and FriendFeed had the desired effect... Two priceless snippets from the TV clip:

"The internet, yes it's about information, but mainly, the internet is about PORN!"
"Facebook?? Pick up the fokking phone!!!!!!"
(I actually think someone should stick her on BBC News and get her to comment on tech trends. It would be priceless viewing.)

So when I was told the next day that Channel 4 wanted it removed from YouTube, I wanted to know why.

* Why, when I'm promoting your TV show, would you want my promotion deleted?
* Why would you wind me up so much by telling me via email, using a 'no reply' email address so I can't engage in a dialogue?
* Why would you risk turning a fan into a hater? Couldn't you just ask me to paste a link to your show?
* Why couldn't you see this as an endorsement, and nowhere near a content rip-off? 

Then I thought, playing devil's advocate, maybe Channel 4 is right.

* Maybe they want people only to see Big Brother content that has adverts on it. My clip didn't.
* Maybe they want to control the online content, so that they get lots of hits?

But it just makes no sense. It was just a one minute clip that promotes Big Brother. In fact, when I got the cease and desist email off YouTube and told Twitter, people actually said that my video was the only reason they watched on the following night.

The fact is that a number of organisations employ colleagues and industry peers of mine to inspire precisely this kind of coverage. Create such buzz and advocacy that someone would video, blog and Tweet about you - that's utopia. But Channel 4? They aspire to achieve the exact opposite. Smart move. Kill a few more viewers.

And if you want to see the vid? Sorry. It's been deleted.