Jeeple and Preeple

Stephen Davies of 3W PR has produced two blog posts of note recently (not that is other posts are rubbish, just these ones have garnered more attention than normal...).

The first post lists journalists in the UK who are on Twitter. The second does much the same, listing PR people in the UK who have a profile on Twitter.

So far, there are 85 journalists on the list compared to 137 PR people by the last count. That's almost twice as many 'preeple' on Twitter as there are 'jeeple' (using Stephen's terms), and the list of PR professionals is growing as people leave comments below the post to be added on to the list.

What does this actually mean anything though (apart from the fact that journalists are now going to get contacted more often by PROs on Twitter, PROs will get contacted by recruiters through Twitter, and Stephen will get a lot more hits to his blog)?

It has been documented that there are currently around three times more PR professionals than there are journalists in the UK, so it might come as no surprise that the list of hacks is longer. 

It might also be an indication of the varying levels of usefulness of Twitter as a tool for both professions:

Journalists can source stories and potential snippits of information on Twitter much quicker than most other tools, tweet stories they've recently published, and use it for sourcing information for articles. There's a much longer list of uses and some good discussion on the subject here.

PRs can use Twitter to have a conversation with their cleint's market and make and mange connections with customers, bloggers and other stakeholders, keep in touch and build relationships with the  media and influential bloggers, monitor mentions of their company or client brands, announce special deals,  post live updates on events or conferences and promote blog posts, webinars, interesting client news and more.

I'm sure that journalists will argue with me on this one, but it may just be that PR professionals have a wider range of users for Twitter than journalists and these uses are more valuable to their work (BTW, this isn't me trying to get journalists to leave comments on this post so we can find out more clearly how they use Twitter...).

Then again, it might also be an indication that PR professionals have more time to waste scouring t'internet and posting up to Twitter ;)

What do you think? Do you feel that there is an imbalance in the number of journalists on Twitter compared to PR people? Is this a bad thing? What does it mean for both journalists and PR professionals?