After last week’s Twitter agency audit in PR Week which missed out Red and Shiny Red, the team there were kind enough to ask my boss, Helen to take part in a panel discussion on how PRs are using the tool.

On Monday, she debated the subject on camera with Edelman’s Marshall Manson and Weber Shandwick’s Simon Collister. As you’ll see from the resulting webcast all three were in broad agreement on Twitter’s ability to connect us to people in new ways whether its clients, bloggers, journalists or communities.

They also talked about the fact that despite all the hype, Twitter is still a minority pursuit. Globally it’s the third largest social network after Facebook and MySpace, but according to Wikipedia it still has only 6m users worldwide.

As mentioned by Helen in the clip, it’s important to think about Twitter as part of the mix within a social media strategy that could also include blogger outreach, forums, and content creation: it is not the only answer. Can it help us as PR professionals build relationships share information, connect in new ways? Absolutely, if you want to put the effort in. But not everyone does. We’ve recently seen trawls of 50 comments responding to an article on Twitter on one of the big portals, and four our of five were negative, along the lines of: “what a waste of time…saddos who should get a life…go out and meet people instead”. [LW: Funny they're making those comments on a website!]

It comes down to a simple PR truth: if you want to connect with your audience, you have to use the right route. Twitter works well when it’s used smartly, and it’s an exciting new part of the comms toolkit, but for all the noise around it right now it’s not a panacea.

Blurb

• Blurb is a start-up book publishing company which allows you to create your own photo- recipe- or travel books with free software. They used FMB to gather recipes from bloggers around the world to create the world’s first blogger cookbook complete with genuine local dishes. 

King of Shaves

• When King of Shaves, best known for its oils and gels decides to make a razor, it struck me as an interesting concept. They sent bloggers a highly professional, slightly too slick, pack (which I didn’t read) with it’s new Azor, which looks and feels nothing like a normal razor… it’s great and very comfortable to use on the easy bits, but not so great on the fiddly parts of your face. I think they’ve got a way to go before I’d regularly use it, but it’s not bad for a first effort.

9Bar

• Wholebake is a small company based in Wales who specialise in making healthy snacks using only natural ingredients. All their products are vegetarian and they offer organic versions of their most popular products. Their 9bar, a hemp seed snack bar, is also gluten, dairy and wheat free.  This interested me because my sister doesn’t eat gluten or wheat.. I call her food “taste free”, since it usually looks like a tasteless version of whatever I’m eating. However, the 9Bar is excellent and really tasty. In addition, I got a hand written note from the boss and a Christmas card as well!

So despite my inability to get this post up on time (it was originally written in early December), I’ll be watching what FMB is up to – and with these brands in particular.

So said Michael Jackson at some point. Anyway, it seems as if holding Twitter meetups in Shoreditch has hit the mainstream. It was announced this week that London’s next iteration of Twestival (the Tweetup to rule them all) will be held at Shoreditch Studios on February 12th. The folks behind Twestival and the more recent Twinterval are doing a great job with their events and I’m glad to see that they’re copying taking inspiration from The Shoreditch Twit in terms of picking the best neighbourhood in London to hold the event. In fact, it “validates the market” –  a phrase from tech PR-land which spokespeople use when Microsoft or Cisco buys their biggest competitor.

Joking aside, they’re very different events, and it’s great to see 70 cities registered to take part in a global Twestival next month. In the meantime, Shoreditch Twit #5 will show its ugly face on January 26th at The Elbow Room, Curtain Road. It’s a Monday night, so see it as a warm-up to the ‘ditch’s blow out in a few weeks, an opportunity to catch up with regular and new faces, a time to find out a bit more about future Twits and what we’ve got planned for 2009, and a chance to beat me at pool… seriously, I’m rubbish.

Deets…
Monday 26th January
The Elbow Room, 97-113 Curtain Road, Shoreditch, EC2A 3BS (map here)
Time: From 7.00pm

As always, RSVP to @shoreditchtwit or leave a comment here so that we have an idea of numbers.

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