Comments on: The Twitter Relations Model

By: Colleen Carrington

Colleen Carrington — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 12:15:53 +0000

You raise some interesting points here – I agree with the need for disclosure. (Sponsored blogging was a hot topic at the recent WOMMA BOD meeting in NY.) The challenge with Twitter is disclosing sponsorship in 140 characters or less! Any ideas?

By: Justin Dotterweich

Justin Dotterweich — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 10:31:11 +0000

Public relations shouldn’t try to take credit for tweets or try to claim that they can influence them. Ultimately, if this is done and “gets out of hand” it will have a negative impact and people on Twitter will become very unresponsive to reps from companies – ending the conversation completely. The best bet is always to focus on forming good relationships. If these result in coverage or positive tweets consider it bonus. If nothing happens at least you were a good ambassador for your company and you have at least one person that has been positively impacted. Don’t expect your followers to listen to everything you say (or the people you’re trying to get tweets from) and never try to coerce a tweet…that’s just not cool.
@AprilRainSkin

By: Philip Lee

Philip Lee — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 22:54:09 +0000

There’s a range from an infomercial (paid and public), testimonial (public), and review (private). These Twitter events lean towards being a testimonial – it’s quite unlikely that you’re going to eat the restaurant’s food and say something bad about it.

What’s interesting is that although these are endorsements, they feel genuine through the magic of social media. If you see someone endorsing a product on an infomercial, you immediately categorize it as an ad. But an endorsement as part of the Twitter feed, in the midst of other interesting personal tweets? It comes across as a friend recommending a restaurant to you – which is one of the most trusted channels of information.

By: Ken Yeung

Ken Yeung — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:19:12 +0000

Great blog post and an interesting perspective on “citizen journalism” using Twitter. I’ve always looked at the web in general to drive more information and buzz, but Twitter is also a great way, but could be considered a slippery slope because how can a company “measure ROI” in the long-term? I suppose with Twitter, people will be able to publish information on a faster real-time basis than with ordinary bloggers who will go to the event, take pictures or videos, ask questions, go home and *potentially* write information.

One thing to raise is that how would you know that these people are Twitterers, let along influential? What is more important, having one person with 100,000 followers at an event or 20 people with 1,000 followers? I’d say that it’s a trick question because you need to find out which ones are more influential. Just because I right now have approx 2,000 followers doesn’t mean I should be less qualified to evaluate a product than, say Robert Scoble. That’s absurd. He may be more well known but the more famous you are, the more issues people will throw at you like disclaimers, past reviews, etc etc while no name people like myself may be able to persuade more of my folks than Scoble and rack up more conversions. So the law of percentages may be to my advantage.

Bloggers will typically be Twitterers so PR people might want to stick with getting bloggers and other new media folks as that information will be automatically fed into Twitter and spread virally. That you can bank on. But until a good evaluation of Twitter profiles is set, it might be hard to justify how PR can claim praise for it (again).

Oh, and if you’re getting paid or sponsored to do something, then you might as well disclose it. Yes, it’s a sponsored post. Morally you should make it clear that you got something, regardless of whether it’s a good or bad blog post, review, video clip, etc.

Just my two cents.