The document provides an introduction to Twitter as a social networking and micro-blogging platform that enables users to share short updates called tweets. It outlines strategies for utilizing Twitter in public relations, including building relationships, managing reputation, and promoting events, while emphasizing the importance of engagement and professionalism. Additionally, it presents case studies of brands effectively using Twitter for communication and outreach.

1. @WeberShandwickUK
Here’s an introduction into Twitter and how
it can be used for PR!
Prepared by Jonny Rosemont
twitter.com/rosemontjd 29 April 2009

2. Agenda
• What is Twitter?
• How’s it work?
• Strategies for clients
• Twitter etiquette
• Twitter resources and tools
• Case studies
• Questions

3. What is Twitter?

4. What is Twitter?
•Twitter.com is a free social networking and micro-blogging service
that allows its users to send and read other users' updates
•Twitter messages “tweets” are composed of 140 character and
answer the question “What are you doing?” or “What are you
interested in right now?”
•A registered Twitter user “Twitterer” has people that they follow
“following” and friends/people that follow them “followers”
Video: http
://dotsub.com/api/smallplayer.php?filmid=3066&filminstance=3068&language

5. What is all the fuss about?
•Twitter now has over 19 million users
globally and is growing at a rate of
1,700% in the UK
•Twitter is now in the top 50 most
popular sites in the world in terms of
traffic (46th
) according to Alexa
•In the UK it is the 17th
most popular site
(6.4% of audience)
•In the US it is the 16th
most popular site
(47.9% of audience)
•The UK has 1.78 million users already
signed onto Twitter.com
•Twitter can help with the following:
•Getting real-time updates and news immediately
•Connect with people who you may have been connected with
•Broadcast real-time updates immediately to your network

6. Demographics
Twitter not a young person’s game...
Strong male bias and older demographic than other social media
71% of Twitter’s UK audience is over 35, more than ¼ over 50

7. How has Twitter become “it”?
•Mass consumer adoption
•Mainstream media and celebrities have
flood to Twitter, using it as a broadcast tool
•Important news worthy events are well
documented and break on Twitter
•Brands have begun listening to and joining
Twitter – with differencing scales of success
Effect of Oprah on Twitter

8. How has Twitter become “it”?
•Users have seen the site as a new way to
engage with friends, interesting people,
parties and brands
•The geek 'A-List' early adopters have so far
remained faithful to the site despite words to
the contrary
•Ongoing rumours of acquisition e.g.
Microsoft, Google and Facebook
•Twitter is proving to be an effective PR and
communications tool

9. Why Use Twitter?
Twitter offers us and our clients a new communications
vehicle that allows you the opportunity to directly interact
with and disseminate information to
members/supporters/friends
What YOU can do with it:
• Build Relationships
• Manage Your Reputation
• Promote Events/News
• Advocate for Issues

10. How’s it work?

11. Getting started
• Register your account
– Choose a username
– Choose a photo (headshot, logo etc)
– Choose a background (customise if required)
• Build your network
– Find who’s already using Twitter
– Follow people you’d be interested in
• What to tweet about
– What are you doing?
– Interesting facts
– Interesting links
– Build conversations @ @ @...
– Listen and learn

12. Types of tweets
• My Tweets – twitter.com/rosemontjd
• @replies = public conversations

13. Types of tweets (cont.)
• #hashtags (tagging tweets)
• RT = retweeting tweets

14. Integrating Twitter with Life
• Mobiles:
– Connect it with your text messaging
– Use 3rd party applications to tweet – iPhone /
Android / Twitterberry
• Blogging:
– Use Twitterfeed.com to push your blogs to
Twitter automatically and RSS the other way
• Facebook
– Connect your tweets with your Facebook
Status using the Twitter Application

15. Strategies for clients

16. Register your account
• Register a Twitter account for clients that provides interested parties with
details or updates on client opinions, news and initiatives
– Only tweet to add value
– Where possible get the client to do this activity themselves – the personality,
not necessarily the brand
– Customise the account’s design to make it as close as possible to the client
brand’s colours and guidelines
– Complex branded environments can be created
– Monitor and update your Twitter feed on a continual basis, engaging with the
community that is directing messages towards it
– Report to client on number of engagements i.e. following, followers,
@Replies, RTs and direct messages

17. Build your network
• Anyone who has members or supporters can use Twitter to listen and
create an online rapport with existing and new audiences
• Identify Twitterers to follow (http://search.twitter.com) that are interested
in you client and/or the area in which they exist
– Begin to follow key members or supporters who are interested in your client or their issue
– Make sure you fully analyse a Twitterer’s appropriateness before choosing to follow
them
– Only choose to follow a small number of appropriate Twitterers at anyone one time,
spamming is simply not on.
– You could stay close to a 50:50 ratio for following/followers as a guide

18. Listening on Twitter
• Go to search.twitter.com,
enter a keyword or phrase into
the search box and click
'search‘
• Review the results page to get
a sense of what people are
talking about
• Utilise RSS: click on 'Feed for
this query‘ you see at the top
right of the search results

19. What to tweet about?
• Engagement in the Twitter community can benefit business through
researching, networking, promoting, news broadcasting, story testing, SEO
and crisis management
• Tweet subjects could include:
– Interesting facts about your industry
– Exclusive news and views
– Content and link sharing
– Specials or promotions
– Information and updates about events
– Handling customer service via Twitter “Social CRM”
– Responding to public criticism
– Questionnaires/polls

20. Relationship building tips
• Personality is paramount! Remember that people expect to tweet with a
human being, not a robot
• Be professional and keep in mind the overall perception of your client
(professional?, quirky?, cheeky?, etc)
• Keep long URLs short by using URL shortener tools such as tinyURL or
bit.ly

21. Relationship building tips (cont.)
• While you’ll be providing your followers with information, be sure to let
them know they’re being heard by replying (@client) to their questions or
their interesting tweets
• If you’d like to communicate privately with followers, send them a direct
message (DM), which is similar to sending them an email but through the
Twitter service

22. Managing your reputation
• Twitter offers your client an opportunity to showcase its personality and
humanity via real people who are behind the messages being tweeted
• People are likely either already talking about your client or at least the
issues that matter most to them. Twitter offers you the ability to see what
people are saying and insert your client or issue into the conversations
• Follow people who are talking about your client and their issues
• Follow thought leaders in your industry. Think about how you can join
them in conversation

23. Managing your reputation (cont.)
• Follow news and media twitterers (i.e. journalists, bloggers, media outlets)
to keep you ‘in-the-know.’ This will help you brainstorm new ideas for
fresh content – also pitching via Twitter is a growing trend
• Remove the organisation-speak and offer your community content that gets
directly at their needs
• Become a thought leader in your area of expertise. Offer them new insights
and information
• Keep the company/organisation updates to a minimum (Remember: It’s as
much about your audience as it is about you)

24. Managing your reputation (cont.)
• Find your biggest fans – those who tweet most often about you and their
love of your work
• Maintain relationships with these unofficial ‘advocates’ and find
interesting ways to fold them into other aspects of your work
• Update as often as possible but don’t over-tweet as that’s very boring

25. Promoting events
Live-tweeting an event offers a new channel of conversation on-site that
enhances the physical experience of the occasion
•Find others who are tweeting about the issues that will be covered at your event; they
may provide valuable word-of-mouth about the occasion
•Create an event-specific hashtag for a specific period of time or create a Twitter
account solely devoted to the event e.g. #G20 or @G20
•Your spotlight will shine on the day of the event. This is your opportunity to provide
on-the-ground updates as they happen

26. Promoting events (cont.)
• Make sure to focus on providing value to people who are in attendance and to those
who are following online - anecdotes, new announcements, inspiring debates,
‘celebrity sightings’ and other interesting tidbits will be of interest to your audience
• Promote your account or hashtag at all aspects of the event in order to generate
conversation
• Ask your followers questions and be sure to stay on top of theirs’
• Organise Tweet-ups (real-life meet-ups) at the event for your followers so that
people can meet one another face-to-face

27. Twitter Etiquette

28. • Find out where your supporters are
• Listen to your community
• Don’t be a bore but do be professional
• Engage with your followers
• Monitor your account and update frequently
• Avoid taking offense – there’s always a few bad apples
• Be authentic; involve a personality from your company/organisation
(Source: http://is.gd/kIiH)

29. Twitter resources and tools

30. • Search
– Search.Twitter – complete an advanced search on keywords, within specific
dates and handles
– Twazzup – a great alternative to the official search
– Twitterholic – Keep track of the top 100 Twitter users. Updates in real-time
– Twitscoop – Find out what is hot on Twitter right now. Live monitoring of the
hottest search terms on Twitter
• Twitter clients
– TweetDeck – A desktop app that helps you organize your followers into
specific categories
– Twirl – A decent alternative to TweetDeck
• URL Shorteners
– TinyURL – The original URL shortener service
– Bit.ly – A new URL shortener which includes analytics on its backend
• Photography
– TwitPic – Post pictures to Twitter via your phone, email or the site

31. • Polls
– TwitPoll – Poll your users on a variety of topics
• Stats
– TweetStats - Takes your Twittering for the last week, including posts, replies
and timeline, and turns them into a lovely graph
– TwitterGrader – Measures the power and authority of a Twitter user by
calculating the number of followers, power of network followers, pace of
updates and completeness of profile
– Twitalyzer – Twitalyzer is a tool to evaluate the activity of any brand in
Twitter and report on relative strength, signal-to-noise ratio, favour, passion,
clout, and other useful measures of success in social media
• Other
– Twittervision - A map of the world, which not only displays tweets, but shows
you where they’re coming from
– Muck Rack – A list of journalists that are on Twitter
– TweetMinister – A list of UK politicians that are on Twitter

32. Case studies

33. A selection of brands that Tweet

34. CNN
CNN (@cnnbrk) uses its
Twitter account for breaking
news worldwide, connecting
interested parties with a
network of virtual reporters.
The Twitter feed was highly
active during key news stories
such as the Hudson River plane
crash and Presidential
Inauguration

35. Sky News
Sky News, the broadcaster, has a
dedicated Twitter-based journalist
@SkyNews to help cater for its large
community of over 13,000 followers

36. Comcast
Frank Eliason started
@comcastcares in April 2008
in response to the customer
conversations he and his team
found on Twitter through
monitoring. Feed offers
customer troubleshooting tips,
online resources, new product
info and customer relations
support

37. Dell
Richard Binhammer
(@RichardatDell) tweets on behalf
of Dell sans an official title. Richard
is quick to respond, straight to the
point, and a great advocate for Dell
and their other twitterers. When
asked to describe his role with Dell,
Richard explained that he has “…no
title. for the past two years I have
been focused on listening, learning
and engaging with blogs and others
in social media.”

38. Innocent Drinks
Innocent Drinks is a pioneer in using social media for its marketing
efforts. The company’s Twitter feed (@innocentdrinks) is a great brand
engagement exercise, with a large amount of interaction between the
brand and its followers

39. CompareTheMarket.com
Part of the successful
marketing initiative
CompareTheMeerkat.com,
those at
CompareTheMarket.com
created a twitter feed for
Aleksandr Orlov. A huge
amount of brand
engagement has happened
as a result

40. Ask Jeeves
Very recently SLAM PR,
Weber Shandwick’s sister
agency, was tasked on re-
launching the Ask Jeeves
brand in the UK. Part of the
strategy has been a
successful campaign where
people can interact with the
Jeeves character
@askjeevesdotcom

41. Twestival
In September 2008, a group of Twitter users
based in London organized an event where
the local Twitter community could socialize
offline, have a few drinks and tie this in
with a food drive and fundraising effort for
a local homeless charity
Around the world similar stories started
appearing of local Twitter communities
coming together and taking action for a
great cause. Twestival was born out of the
idea that if cities were able to collaborate on
an international scale, but working from a
local level, it could have a spectacular
impact

42. Questions?
Presentation by Jonny Rosemont
Consulant @ Weber Shandwick Digital Communications
jrosemont@webershandwick.com
http://www.twitter.com/rosemontjd

43. Key Thanks/Credits
• Hitwise
• comScore
• Alexa.com
• Nielsen Online
• Caroline Preston
• Neville Hobson
• Teachstreet
• Powell Tate
• Interpublic Emerging Media Lab
• Jeremy Owyang, Forrester Research
• Mashable
• Drew Benvie, Hotwire PR