THE SOCIAL SESSIONS

In order to demystify the wonders of social media, Dangling Carrot is undertaking a unique cyber experiment. We’ll be reviewing the latest developments and shedding a little totally bias and opinionated light on the topic that everyone’s talking about.

If you don’t know your feeds from your forums or your tweets from your tags, this is the place to learn (well, perhaps)

Session 1: Micro-blogging - Twitter It’s pretty evident that micro-blogging is getting more and more popular by the day and consequently it’s now the biggest platform on the web. This means there’s a whole new emerging market waiting to be explored and exploited; it’s just being techno savvy enough to know how to do so.

Not one for missing out, I decided to jump on the micro-blogging band wagon and investigate further. I chose to focus on the fastest growing social media site, Twitter.

Twitter is a free to join, online service that allows you to update your status with short messages, very much like an SMS text message. Its social element is that is allows users to befriend one another, and ‘follow’ one another. When you follow somebody on twitter you are able to instantly receive their updates and keep up to date with their status. Twitter is part of micro blogging therefore designed to be quick and easy to use. You can use numerous means of technology to use twitter; via the web page, mobile phone, IM, the list is endless. Right, where to start. An important thing to grasp before you begin ‘Tweeting’ is the Twitter terminology otherwise it will all look like gibberish! (well it did to me!). Easy to understand Twitter directories are popping up everywhere online, so learning about how to prepare your ‘profile’, ‘direct messages’, ‘tweeting’, ‘retweeting’ and your ‘wall’ should all be easy peasy. Fear not, this is not complex stuff! Okay so terminology mastered, now to get started... It’s quick and easy to set up an account, in all it takes about 5 minutes. It took me a little longer as I insisted on decorating my homepage (optional).

I began by searching areas of interest and people I knew to suss the tweet etiquette and I quickly learnt people pretty much tweet and use twitter at their own discretion. Friends and family tended to just tweet about what they ate for breakfast and occasionally gossip about things they’ve seen and heard down the twitter grape vine. Whereas brands and publications seemed to use it as a channel to plug a key story or product.

But if you look really hard amongst all the waffle, you find some hidden gems! From a PR’s perspective it’s great for following journalists, every now and again they’ll tweet about what they’re working on and just like that, you have the inside scoop!

So gossip aside, I’ve learnt twitter offers great opportunities for us PR pros. Here is what I’ve learnt so far...

• Traffic generator – post information, images and links to help generates traffic to your site.

• Promotional tool – It can be used to shout your story and spread the word!

• New communication platform - It’s an alternative means of communication that allows you to use personality.

• Research – a little like getting your gossip fix, this allows you to research your audience. You can spy on people/brands and see what they’re up to. Offering you an inside story that you wouldn’t have necessarily known otherwise!

• News - Because twitter is so quick to use, news and gossip can pretty much be instant. Twitter allows you to find out about the latest goings on in a particular field of activity you’re following, within minutes of the actual event!

• Networking - Twitter allows you to find new and like minded individuals that share the same interests.

• The choice - It’s not intrusive – you can choose to follow/un-follow tweets as when you feel like it.

• It’s viral! – Twitter is the new viral ‘word of mouth’. Its helps spread things quickly and easily across a community making a great new communication channel.

As a gossip guru who is easily confused by technology I loved Twitter. The only down side to Twitter, depending on your followers is the sheer volume of tweets. Time and effort is involved when digging out those hidden gems! I’ve just learnt This Morning are planning a shoe feature, time to get on the phone about our footwear clients...

Scores on the board:

User-friendliness: 4/5

Function: 5/5

Aesthetics: 2/5

Shock factor: 3/5

PR value: 2/5