People use Twitter no matter the age, profession, gender. The micro-blogging platform has brought both journalists and PR pros together, while offering the latter the opportunity to do media relations in real time. How come? Well, press releases, interviews, pitches and press conferences can be held on Twitter.
THE TWEET RELEASE
The tweet release is a short press release that only contains the lead - who, what, when, where, why.
Examples of such releases (below) were posted by Cristian Manafu, top blogger in Romania. He calls them “news in 140 characters” (I find the name quite appropriate:)):
• Microsoft organizes a series of workshops in March;
• The forum on Tourette has been lunched;
• Ericsson lunches a competition for students interested in developing applications.
THE TWINTERVIEW
A twinterview is an interview held on Twitter. The advantage of such approach is that journalists get the answers they need in real time (compared to an email interview for example). Moreover, it is time saving because journos do not have to commute to a certain venue (like in the case of face-to-face interviews). The real time issue also applies in case of the readers (followers) who read the ongoing interview.
Check out the first and the second twinterview in the UK.
THE TWITPITCH
Pitching stories on Twitter seems to be more efficient from journalists’ point of view (as Jeremy Porter wrote) because:
• It forces PR pros to go straight to the point because of the 140-character limit;
• It allows PR people to learn what a journalist is interested in writing about by following the journo on Twitter, thus eliminating “spam”.
THE TWEET CONFERENCE
Tweet conferences gather journos and company officials on Twitter and have similar advantages as twinterviewes.
I would say: TWEET. But be cautious, learn how to use Twitter, make sure you follow the right journos and send them appropriate (newsworthy, attractive etc) tweets.
You might be also interested in reading about @MicroPR :)
Posts
I continue thinking that Twitter can not help a company in any way. For example, you talk about the twinterview, and for a journalist who can not assist to the interview could be good, but I think that when you go to a interview the words are not the only important thing, becasue the non verbal language could give you the news.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, the examples that you write about tweet release, I think that they could be useful if they had a press release attacked or with a link of the newsroom of the company, because the examples do not answer the 5W. The first one, it does not mention why and where and the third one does not explain when, where and why, so the journalist would need more data for writing a news.
Maybe Twitter could be the first step in the communication of the company with the journalists, but I think that not the only one.
Non verbal communication indeed lacks when we communicate online. However usually in interviews words are the ones that count and not facial expressions, for example. I have not seen an interview title reading "CEO showing a surprised face". Non verbal communication in face-to-face interviews is usually depicted in the photos taken during the interview, which are “live” and movement pictures. Indeed such a picture cannot exist during a twinterview. But the participants can use this type of photos in the profile during the twinterview.
ReplyDeleteThe examples of the tweet releases are not mine; they were posted by Cristian Manafu and belong to several companies. They were just some general examples not best practices :) Indeed some do not answer all 5W and a link would have been useful. Probably the initial tweets were longer and contained links to more info but Manafu presented the essence I suppose. They do sound more like titles than leads now. But they are enough to catch the attention of journalists interested in particular stories.
The important thing is to know such practices exist and we should try to take advantage of them.
Nobody says Twitter is the only one but who knows what happens in the future. Actually in US 50% of journalists are using Twitter.
http://stedavies.com/2010/03/48-percent-of-journalists-are-using-twitter/
This does not mean they do not use it for personal issues as well but the percentage shows Twitter is popular among US journalists and Twitter media relations are possible and happening.