Twitter

What's your name? I want to follow you.

 

Ask AMacIssac. She uses for updates and stuff. I mostly just follow other feeds (more like an RSS feed) -- the lolcats, Society to protect journalists, the NYT, Shaq.

 

Never mind, Moddy. I found ya.

 

Moddy, now that you're in the entrepreneurial world, I'd suggest you hook up with other PR pros, like I've done, and learn from them and share information with them.

#journchat, a discussion between PR pros and journalists that occurs every Monday night (have to check on the times but it's around dinner time for me), is also a great way to dive right into the Twitter realm. You can either follow along by going to search.twitter.com and entering #journchat or going to tweetchat.com and enter journchat as the room. Tweetchat has an auto refresh function.

I've learned a ton by participating in journchat. It's been a great resource for me.

You can do the search now and last week's Tweets will still show up.

As well, you might want to find out if anyone is Tweeting under a particular hashtag for your city. (All a hashtag does, really, is facilitate the search process, defining your topic.) That's a great way to spread the word about your business locally and get to know people in your locale.

I've also used it to connect with media and pitch stories, believe it or not.

140 characters forces one to be fairly concise, something which many journalists appreciate, no?

 

In your country? No.

 

RebeccaLobo

 

I know the feeling
I'm guessing you and I are close in demographic, and I've moved from the print world to the on-line world. Like you, I've been investigating twitter and its uses

Does it have a use? Debatable, but it is certainly at the forefront of the 2009 lexicon, as Facebook was for 2008

We're going to use it in our shop for instant news updates, but not to alert readers to a new posted story. More real news coming from the games, practices etc, from our entire reporting staff

I don't know how to use it for your purposes - networking etc. It would seem to me that reading someone's inane updates (and not suggesting yours are, but most are (see, SHAQ) - would make me hesitate on the professional front, but that's just me

 

Just found you.

 

I think Facebook will be around much longer and has much more use.

Twitter is prominent in large part because of its extensive collection of celebrities. In todays society, the ability to track the everyday movement of stars like Dave Matthews, Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, Martha Stewart, and Britney Spears is something people enjoy doing.

 

I'm mainly using it for headlines (ESPN, CNN, &c). From that point of view, it's better than Facebook.

But for nearly everything else, FB (and for that matter, MySpace :-X ) is better than Twitter.