I’ve written a piece for AllMediaScotland about the joys of Tweeting and using Twitter and what benefits it can bring to news and PR organisations here.
(And anyone wanting to sign up for AMS’ Tweets can do so here.)
I’ve written a piece for AllMediaScotland about the joys of Tweeting and using Twitter and what benefits it can bring to news and PR organisations here.
(And anyone wanting to sign up for AMS’ Tweets can do so here.)
5 responses to “Singing the Praises of Twitter and Tweeting”
I thought the “140-plus word” article on allmediascotland both enlightening and interesting. I certainly feel tweeting and Twitter could be a useful, additional tool in the service I provide to my clients in terms of PR. Your copy makes it all sound so straightforward that not giving it a shot would be a missed opportunity.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge and thoughts.
Best regards,
Mike
Shill.
Seriously though, and with the greatest of respect, your piece -as with all the other evangelical articles on Twitter over the last year or so – fails to address the biggest problem with it. Namely, absolutely no mainstream value at the moment. Seriously – all the twitters from T that yourself and Shaun were doing were great, but who were they to? How many casual punters use Twitter on a regular basis to get feeds from news or sports sites? At the moment there’s no intrinsic value to the service other than as a verbal bullshit flinging service for new media hacks – and I freely include myself among that number. But for your average tabloid audience, it’s as worthless as text alert services – and how many people still use those?
Twitter lacks the mainstream appeal of a Youtube or a Flickr or even a Google Earth, and the limitations to the service at present suggest it won’t cross over to the mainstream the way those sites and services have done. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a fun tool, it has a lot of uses and it could, with time and impetus behind it, become a useful fact-dissemination tool.
In purely practical terms, it’s easy to say a paper should have someone twittering from each tent at a festival, but realistically how many people will use the service as readers/consumers of those tweets? Thousands? Hundreds? Tens? At which point does it become economically unviable and just vanity publishing and gimmickry?
Iain, one of the reasons I wanted to Tweet T in the Park was that it was an easy way of sending updates back to this site – I have a widget which takes Tweets and turns them into blog posts – as trying to do blogposts on a Nokia N95 would have been horrific.
From that, I gained a spike in traffic to here and also gained 12 new Tweet followers, which I’ll take. Gaining readers is something most places aren’t managing.
Your point is fair enough but at no point do I see Twitter as a solution to the world’s ills. It’s another form of communication and a handy way of seeing what your chums have been up to. The trick is to make sure your chums are posting interesting comments.
The content is as important as the medium and Tweets should be great for good writers of the quick sarcastic line. In other words: you.
I appreciate that, Craig, but my point is not relating to you and Shaun tweeting from T so much for your own blog readers, but specifically to your comments about how and why papers should be using Twitter to cover festivals next year. I enjoyed reading your tweets, and if you got 12 new people reading your comments during the weekend, then well done.
But breaking those 12 down statistically, what demographic are they? Regular blog readers? Music fans? New media users? Journalists? How many of the 12 were just random joe punters looking for T in the Park reviews? I’m not having a go – I’m genuinely interested to know the breakdown and analytics there – because if it’s something, as you suggest on AMS, that could be sold upon or have commercial or news dissemination value beyond just ‘what your chums have been up to’ it has to hit mainstream audiences.
I can see the value of someone like NME.Com doing one-line festival updates. But the practicalities of having a reporter in every tent, and those reporters twittering almost continuously for 12 hours a day, two or three days over a weekend, at the same time as doing everything else they need to while on the ground seems impractical.
Ulitmately, with my editor’s hat on, my concern remains this: nobody has as yet been able to construct a convincing model for how Twitter can be used editorially and commercially for the mass media market.
The breakdown of new readers I honestly couldn’t tell you. None of their names are familiar to me and from reading their tweets, they do seem to have been music fans. As for reporters, if you have a reporter in there to cover a band, they could be using the tweets as their notes – sending off updates every song, just as a football reporter could be sending updates every minute during a game.
Then afterwards, when they go to do their bigger write-up, they’ve already filed a chunk of copy that they can pick up and use as the basis of the article. It could also be handy for subs on deadline. Instead of waiting until the last minute for copy (as normally happens) they could be picking up the tweets and putting them in the article as they happen.
(and don’t worry, I know you’re not having a go and I enjoy this. As I’ve said, I don’t think Tweeting is a killer app for communications but I think it’s a handy method of communication. It’s not perfect (and does have some obvious drawbacks), but it’s useful. To me, it’s an additional form of communication, not the form of communication.