How can PR practitioners use Twitter?

Since signing up to Twitter, I've tried to apply its use to the practise of PR - how it can improve my PR practises, how clients can benefit from it, how it can be used to generate coverage/awareness/clearer communciation, etc.

Before I go on any further, I'm not just selfishly mining Twitter for its use to me as a PR practitioner, but I'm also getting immersed in the community and hopefully contributing to it in a meaningful way (or as meaningful a way as 140 word texts can be...).

So how can the PR industry use Twitter?

For the personal and celebrity PR sector, Twitter can be used to alert people and create awareness of events that a client will be appearring at. For example, Stuart Bruce is using Twitter for politician Alan Johnson, who is campaigning for the position of deputy leader of the UK Labour party, to create buzz by posting a sentence or two about each event he attends. You can see how they are using Twitter on the campaign home page. (Thanks Tom!)

This can be applied to any event that needs PR to raise awareness/create buzz for. There have already been several examples of people using Twitter (Twits?) to blog about events, so the reverse could also happen - events blogging to the people.

Lee Odden followed this same trail of thought when he posted some great tips as a Guide to Twitter as a Tool for Marketing and PR, which included discussion on Twitter's commercial uses:

"A variety of commercial applications for Twitter have begun popping up including political candidates posting updates from the road as has happened with Barack Obama & John Edwards. Other commercial and marketing use examples of Twitter include JetBlue promoting special offers, the BBC posting news items, Apple posts it’s own news (bypassing the media - hmmm) and online retailer Woot posting deals throughout the day".

For internal communications, if your organisation's internal system breaks down, Twitter could be used as a back up. Companies can use Twitter when mass communicating amongst several employees, as long as the communications are not confidential! (Thanks David!)

For Charity PR, Twitter can be used to direct people to good causes. There's plenty of posts of people doing sponsored events - charities could use their supporters who are on Twitter to communciate and get the message out about their event. Twitter allows people to use their friend lists to propagate that information faster, and try to draw more direct help down to a problem. (Thanks Drew!)

David Armano has an interesting angle that is applicable to the PR industry:

"If you are interested about marketing, conversations and the ways which we communicate with each other (and how this is changing and evolving), you should at least investigate what the hoopla is all about. My recent experiences with Twitter tell me that the service is morphing due to how users want to use it. What was once initially designed to answer the question “what are you doing?”, has turned into a free-form communications service where people are having burts of shorthand conversations, sharing links and information in rapid-fire fashion…Personally, I think Twitter is a pretty powerful tool for anything involving promotions, events and communities."

It is also worth pointing to several tools for Twitter that would be of use for PR practitioners:

TweetVolume, a frequency search tool to see how often a unique name (person, brand, etc) is mentioned on Twitter, would be really useful to see how much your client/product/brand is being discussed in the "Twittersphere" (Bare with me - still getting the hang of Twitter lingo...)

Twitter Groups allows you to tag your followers into different groups, which means you can send a message to those groups without needing to send the message to each person one at a time - great for finding people interested in a particular story/prudct/brand or to find ready made case studies before pitching to a journo, or for targeting specific groups of people when you need a response about an issue.

For a complete list of Twitter applications, take a look here.

In the end, it is worth quoting Sharon Sarmiento who argues that we should imitate the people who are using Twitter intelligently:

"If you do, you just might find a new way of connecting with your target niche, scoop a story before your competitors, meet a future business partner, or streamline your arsenal of electronic communication tools."

Aren't the points that Sharon makes applicable to all PR tools, traditional or otherwise?

Essentially, Twitter is another tool for communication - like blogging, podcasts, and other social networking sites - where traditional PR practise needs to be applied and used intelligently for our PR needs.