Peter Shankman and Sandra Fathi at PRSANY Advance Twitter Panel

Twitter is Pets.com until it makes money – Peter Shankman

On November 3 Sandra Fathi gave a presentation to the New York Chapter of The Public Relations Society called, “Advance Twitter” offering more tips/advice from her previous October presentation. Peter Shankman provided the second half of the presentation providing insight on his use of Twitter and social media in general.

Sandra provided the following points:

– Is your audience on Twitter?

– All PR folks need to understand web analytics

– Your organization needs to have a social media usage policy for employees spelling out what they can and cannot do. Where can you start? The Word of Mouth Marketing Association has guidelines for social media usage policy.

– How do I keep track of my competitors? Just subscribe to all your competitors on Twitter or sign up for Twitter alerts that are sent to your email via TweetBeep.

– Twitter Fan Wiki is a great guide to Twitter

Peter made the following points:

– Be interesting and don’t be stupid

– Twitter is pets.com until it makes money

– We have embraced text messages and short twelve second videos

– Embrace the concept not the brand

– If the client is not tweeting or blogging themselves, they do not get it

– You have to teach your client to tweet as they have to be doing it themselves

– When you tweet it is invasive so be interesting and worth the attention.

– The art of Twitter is the re-tweet where valuable information gets passed on. This will grow your personal brand.

– Worse thing to do with Twitter is to be tweeting on a consistent basis, and then just stop (Delta Airlines last tweet was June.) Peter tweeted to Delta about being stuck in an airport and four hours later NorthWest responded offering him a seat on one of their flights. He is still waiting for Delta to respond.