Is Twitter Productive?

While meeting for a coffee the other night (though of course we had hot chocolate – don’t want to be up all night!) my friend told me Twitter was ridiculous and nobody used it. He also said that companies just used it to fire out messages that nobody reads. I argued back that it was for academics and professionals to exchange information, which seemed to convince him. Actually, I think I might agree with him. Sorry John, it was a reflex to disagree with you.

As I browse the 100s of tweets and re-tweets on the subject ‘PR and social media’, which I have typed into my rather snazzy Hootsuite account, something occurs to me. These people have jobs and, dare I say it, lives. Yet, instead of blatantly sitting on Facebook looking at their 2nd cousin's holiday snaps they are tweeting. Granted, they are tweeting about things related to their employment, for example, today it is mostly on the Nestle screw up. Twitter can feel much more productive that other sites such as Facebook. Mostly, Facebook is for personal use and so is classed as non-productive work. Twitter, however, can be used for professional use, apart from the few tweets to Stephen Fry you slipped under the radar. I can’t help but wonder if this is really a semi-productive way to alleviate the boredom of office work.

I know that I am finding Twitter a pleasant way to waste my time and I am almost definitely sure it is because it is all in the name of the Digital PR course I am doing and so is therefore, technically, work. Also, I secretly hope to be discovered by some prospective employer so I won’t have to go through the rigmarole of actually applying for a job, but that is another matter.

Brian Solis talks about this very thing. Part of his argument is that it using social media during working hours acts as a little break and reinvigorates you to start on some ‘real’ work. But I suppose my point is much more along the lines of Twitter as a PR campaign tool. PR practitioners can tweet happily away in the name of the organisation they represent and feel like they are doing something. But are they?

Derek Hodge has mentioned many times in our lectures that there is, as yet, no empirical evidence that Twitter works for organisations. I haven’t found any but I have a feeling there must be some in the pipeline – someone out there must be aching for a year off to do a PhD is something just up this alley. So until this research comes out it can’t really be qualified as a viable tool for organisations though I can’t help but hope it turns out to be a profoundly large waste of time for everyone involved, just for my own amusement.

Online Voting

A new poll by Lewis PR has found that more than three-quarters of the public would vote online if given the chance. This could herald in a new and interesting turn of events for the political process in the UK. The poll also says 56% of people are looking up political websites in order to learn more about political parties. This makes it clear that this election is already squarely on board the online communications train but what would online voting do to the next election?

Voter turnout in the UK is unpredictable, but the last two general elections have had particularly low turnouts of around 60%, while the average between 1922 and 1997 has been more than 70%. The low turnout of the past few elections can be explained by a variety of reasons, as Alison Park describes. However, it is difficult to predict, in light of the recent scandal of MPs’ expenses and financial crisis, how people will react this time round. The fact that Conservative and Labour parties are close in the polls may remove some of the apathy that the certainty of a Labour landslide induced in 2001 and 2005.

Online voting would remove the issues of actually getting to the polling station, as the clip from the The West Wing below, demonstrates. (Republicans in Orange County would be less likely to vote after work if it was raining...for those of you not obsessed with The West Wing).


For political public relations, as PRWeek brings up, online communications are measurable and enable engagement with specific publics, and in this case, the general public. If online voting became a real possibility, it could mean that politicians could be less inclined to go door-to-door and much more likely to be 'IM'ing their constituents instead. But though this ‘engagement’ is valid in its own right, is it really a replacement for getting to moan about the bins at your candidate in real life?

There is a plethora of issues online voting brings up. Vote tampering is just one of them. But I can’t help but think it would be interesting to see how much of a difference it would make and whether it would separate the wheat of apathy from the chaff of laziness when it comes to deciding the future of our country.

PR on a one-to-one basis

Social media is an excellent communications tool and is consistently raved about in public relations circles. Public relations, it could be argued, is still struggling to find a professional niche of its own which is not encroached by marketing. How public relations stands out as being different to marketing is the emphasis on ‘building relationships’ rather than sending out ‘messages’. So how does social media such as Twitter (which is limited to 140 characters) constitute building relationships?

As the above satirical cartoon from the Daily Telegraph indicates there is scepticism that social media communication is entirely vacuous status updates about what you had for breakfast. And so it can be. But it can also be more, as Gini Dietrich indicates in her article. With thought-out strategy and philosophical backing, social media can be the way public relations professionals find their way back to building relationships on a one-to-one basis.

For the most part, social media is one-sided in that organisations send out information and recipients receive it, though don’t necessarily interact with it. The added value of using social media is that the recipient can interact with that message if they want to. They can respond, and then the organisation can reply and so on. This will not happen when someone walks past a billboard and disagrees, or agrees, with the messages they find there. This may be all rather self-explanatory for those who are familiar with social media tools and for these people the question ‘So what?’ might spring to mind.

As many people have been commenting, social media allows public relations practitioners to evaluate their campaigns more effectively, and on a more personal level. Before the utilisation of social media, practitioners relied largely on the behaviour of publics or on the results of surveys, which could be expensive and not always very useful. It is true that, in many ways, social media can be very impersonal and mechanistic. Yet, in the current world we live in it is actually one of the few ways people can interact on a one-to-one basis. This is a busy world and people have less time for one another (I am not speaking from a philosophical point of view about personal relationships but am thinking in business terms…let’s leave that to the Loose Women ladies).

The old models provided by public relations academics such as the Wesley and McLean model where A spoke to B who relayed it to C and feedback looped round again has been completely altered by social media. This video blog by Nisha Kaur Pawar is an interesting look at the utilisation of social media by public relations, including looking at the Obama campaign. The topics discussed are akin to what all public relations students must be discussing. And the more we talk about it, the more we can learn and how better to do it than via social media? Oh yeah...over a coffee, or if we are feeling adventurous a glass of wine.

Radio 2's Get Connected Campaign

BBC Radio 2 is the most popular radio station in the United Kingdom and it launched its month-long ‘Get Connected’ campaign on the 1st of March. For a while now Radio 2’s slogan has been ‘Online, On Digital and on 88 – 91 FM’ but it is clear they want to broaden their base of online listeners and interact with them more effectively. The listeners of Radio 2 are mostly over 25 but the wide range of music they play means there is large variety in the audience base.

Radio 2 is tapping into an important public relations issue. It could be argued that social media has in many ways has got ahead of itself and subsequently left important publics behind. Those that know about the World Wide Web often engage and understand the ramifications of their engagement but those that don’t know are walking blind. Although 70% of the UK households had access to the internet in 2009, 30% of an entire population is a significant number to not even have wherewithal to receive your tweets. It is natural in this era of social media that public relations campaigns utilise the potential for this type of communication but it is also important to recognise that people can get left behind.

It appears that those that have ‘got connected’ use the sites that social media led public relations targets such as Facebook, which is apparently now more popular than email. However, the way that people use social media varies greatly, from so-called addicts to people who can just about navigate their hotmail account. So even those who are connected may not be as engaged as we might assume.

I believe it is important to still run awareness campaigns and make sure that when a social media led public relations campaign is launched it isn’t sent off into cyberspace to be received or understood by no-one. Radio 2 has obviously recognised the need to pull those who aren’t connected into the 21st century, no doubt so that they can interact more fully with their listeners. Just because the internet became accessible to more than cyber geeks in 1995 does not mean everyone is up to speed...people still listen to Bananarama for Pete’s sake.