To tweet or not to tweet…
September 16th, 2009 by Paul Unger 
In a guest blog post Paul Unger, editor of property news website, Place North West, shares a personal view of the value of Twitter:
Like many people I’m in two minds about Twitter. Not wanting to be left behind in the scramble for online immediacy and the next big media platform, but wary of the distraction from what I thought was the day job.
Of all the ways to describe the beguiling phenomenon of Twitter that have sprung up, the best has to be The Guardian Media desk’s heading for all memos about their own Twitter Strategy: Twatergy. It’s something not to be ignored but a pain in the arse at the same time.
In the media’s hands it reminds me of the BBC and broadsheets’ obsession with Brown and Blair at its marital painful height. Yes it was important and interesting - if you think politics is important and interesting - but it was a sad geeky clique as well, that turned readers off. The editors and political correspondents were seduced by the access they enjoyed and thought it endlessly fascinating when in fact it was dull.
How many journalists have mainly PRs following them on Twitter? I do. I’ve started doing a bit more on Twitter but in four months have still done only about 40 updates on there. I get told via Blackberry on a Sunday afternoon whilst painting the back yard that some cryptic pseudonym is following me. Fine. Who? Why?
The biggest problem I have with it is not the usual guff about our fixation with our own celebrity or who cares whether someone makes it to the gym tonight, it’s a professional one.
As a commercial property journalist operating in a small niche of the British business-to-business publishing world I have always been told to know your reader, know what interests them, and stay focused on those two things. As a freelancer I also have to know who exactly will pay me. Any journalist on Twitter in work time should ask themselves, ‘who are my readers and are they on here’.
I was asking a senior Manchester surveyor his thoughts about TomBloxhamMBE (to give him his full chosen Twitmark) being on there and the surveyor stopped me with ‘what’s Twitter’. My readers are not on there. My job is to spend my time and effort getting stories about and for them. They pay me at Place North West and Property Week for content published in those places, not on a free website they haven’t heard of. My job is to serve the paying readers.
Are Estates Gazette right to be on Twitter so much when, the last time I checked, an individual subscription to its website, EGi, was £650+VAT. What is your job and who are your readers? It’s why I will keep it strictly low key and see what happens. If PRs use it to tell their clients about stories and they become my readers, maybe it’s worth it. If all we are doing is chatting in the corridors of our internal clique, let’s get back to some real work.
Tags: , Paul Unger, Property Week, The Guardian, Tom Bloxham, twitter
September 16th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Good thoughts by Paul, I have to admit I am a journo and a Twitter fan. I have Seesmic Desktop in the corner of my screen and the updates are like a wire’s feed with those I’m following and also specific keyword searches. Sometimes it’s silly stuff and now and again you find a great story that someone’s accidentally Tweeted too early…
The inane banter that sometimes occurs with PR folk and contacts is actually a positive thing, after all it’s increasingly rare to have the chance to nip out for a quick coffee or lunch to network nowadays. If conversations begin with Twitter, surely that’s good? It is “social networking” after all - whether digital or otherwise.
The key distinction is the “personal” Twitter account where you network and do some research and the “official” account which is branded by the organisation you are working for. The former requires chat, the latter needs “engagement”!
And those pictures of drunken nights out with Staniforth can remain on Facebook…!!
September 18th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
Paul, if you’d like to try to try to focus your twitter activity / relationships with PRs, you might want to get involved with @PropertyHT at http://twitter.com/PropertyHT part of the hacktweets.com experiment.