MarCom Professional

The ‘Top Twitterers’ aren’t in the PR industry

Last week, with all the noise about PR-agencies-on-Twitter league table, I got a great insight into the Twitter communities that I’m part of and their different mindsets.

The first is the PR community on Twitter, which I’m part of as it’s the industry I work in, in which we generally talk shop and share other bits of work-related news and resources. The second is the Not-For-Profit community, which I’m part of due to my involvement with things like Twestival and Bright One, in which we generally talk shop and share other bits of NFP-related news and resources.

Two communities who use Twitter in a similar way, but two different mindsets as made apparent by two recent events.

The now-infamous PR Week article, ‘Twitter has suddenly exploded‘, caused great uproar on Thursday when it was announced that Hotwire (my current employer) were announced as “as the most active PR consultancy on social networking tool Twitter.”

Many people were quick to point out the league table’s flaws: Do you measure how tweetable an agency is by the number of staff who tweet? Or by your number of followers, or the numbers you follow? Or how often you tweet? How Twitter is used as a PR tool is surely more important than how many people use it?

This ‘willy waving’ was put into perspesctive by Sarah Taylor:

Perhaps the most pertinent question came from Bryony Beynon:

“How can what is essentially a big dick contest come off this impotent?”

Now, we all know that the methodology was flawed/incomplete (several agency figures are inaccurate and Stephen Davies seemed to be missed out altogether), but Mat Morrison had a good go at it and gives a great explanation behind the whole piece of research. Peter Hay of PR Week did a great job by running the piece in the first place and made a smart move by running a follow-up piece when the negative comments started to flow.

League tables like this prove nothing about how those agencies are using Twitter or if they are bringing value to the Twitter community. Drew Benvie pointed out in the article Twitter’s real value in PR:

“As a platform for use in public relations, Twitter is invaluable. From networking, to story mining, to issues tracking and news seeding, the only limitation of systems such as Twitter is how far you’re willing to go with experimentation and breaking new ground.”

But that didn’t stop agencies becoming petty about the accuracy of the figures as a reflection of their agency, or even being included in the research at all when not defining themselves as PR agencies, but wanting to be included in a PR Week piece of research.

Now, compare all of this to an event that happened the night before the league table was published. The Not-For-Profit Tweetup.

This was a meet up of Twitter users - and those interested in the potential of Twitter and other social media - who work at, or with, not-for-profit organisations, and what a fantastic event it was. Organised by Rachel, Amy, Paul and Jonathan, the event created a whole lot of useful content for those who couldn’t make it down on the night - including a podcast that is due to appear soon.

Here was a mix of people - some relatively new to Twitter, some with much more experience - from a range of different organisations coming together to truly explore how to use Twitter for the benefit of their orgainsations and ultimately the stakeholders they are trying to engage with.

There wasn’t any ‘willy waving’ going on in this room and everyone was keen to collabroate, as the evening began with a slideshow of single slides contributed from delegates and those taking part online. The slides answered the question “what is Twitter to you?”:

People who couldn’t come along on the evening could take part using the #nfptweetup hashtag. As Howard Lake pointed out:

“The flood of messages using the hashtag “#nfptweetup” (or identifying tag) grew so much that the term ‘trended’ on Twitter, meaning that it was one of the top 10 words or phrases being used on Twitter at the time.”

Attendees were then split into groups to discuss different aspects of Twitter, with third sector and agency/supplier staff sharing their ideas, questions and thoughts freely. You can see the results of the discussion here. The only PR industry event I’ve been to with this level of engagement, level of sharing and keeness to share ideas and resources is Measurement Camp.

Events like the nfptweetup - and Twestival for that matter - have worked because of the networked, active engagement of a wide variety of people sharing similar needs and interests. I’m not sure if we’d see this kind of colloboration in the PR industry, especially in light of some of the activity surrounding the PR Week Twitter league table.

I realise it is probably unfair to compare the two - PR vs NFP, a league table vs events - but I feel these two differing Twitter communities do shed light on the different mindsets of the groups. Perhaps if there was a league table of NFPs on Twitter we might see a similar reaction?

I doubt it though and I’d be keen to see more openness and collaboration from within the PR industry going forward. Measurement Camp is a good example of how this could work - and that was started Nixon McInnes, who are  a ’social media agency’ (in their own words),  not a PR agency.

I guess my thoughts could be summed up neatly, if somewhat crudely, with “it’s time for less willy waving and more world saving.”

Perhaps PR people are ‘more advanced’ in their use of Twitter and their competitive natures ocme out when league tables are published. Perhaps those in the NFP sector are still playing catch up to PRs and still have shiny new object syndrome with Twitter, but having experienced these two ‘events’ in such a short space of time, it also leads me to believe that the ‘Top Twitterers’ aren’t in the PR industry, but in the Not-For-Profit sector.

Thoughts?

Also posted on www.puddingrelations.com