The more our teams use Twitter in support of PR programs, the more uses we find for it.
I thought I'd share two recent examples: one in which Twitter helped during an interview, and a second (for tomorrow's post) that demonstrates Twitter's value for market research.
At Fusion PR we have taken to following influencers (traditional media and analysts as well as key bloggers) on Twitter. The account person for one of our clients scheduled one such influencer, a long time BI and data management reporter, for an interview with the client.
Since we were following the journalist, we could tune into her Tweets – which we did in real time, during the interview.
We were surprised to see the journalist issue questions via Twitter during the briefing. In general, she was trying to get a better understanding of the client's technology. Of course she could have (and did) ask the client questions directly. But Twitter gave her another way to fill in gaps and research the client further, in real time, by querying industry folks (who, it can be assumed, comprise her followers) to get additional information – to fact check.
The cool thing was that Twitter gave the PR team a way to fact check the journalist's fact checking. We could do this directly, by seeing the questions she issued on Twitter and her replies to those who answered. We could click on the Twitter names of the responders to see what they said. If we wanted to, we could have taken it a step further and used Twitter search to see all responders – not just those she replied to.
I should note that there was nothing sensitive being discussed. It was a background interview, not about anything that was secretive. There was nothing sneaky going on from either side; it was all very above board and very transparent. The journalist knows we follow her and in fact follows the person on the account – the person who related the story to me. The journalist was simply trying to get smarter – and we were trying to make sure she had accurate information.
By monitoring the interview on Twitter we were able to spot and correct some misinformation that someone had Tweeted, and the journalist and client were appreciative.
