Sara McKinniss, Communication Coordinator

Did you hear the one about the Fail Whale? Yeah, neither did I until I started using Twitter early this year.

After a discussion with @wiltpr and @springfieldedge yesterday about Twitter, it made me really think about Twitter in a more dynamic way. The explosion of the 140-character message over the last year has greatly changed the way in which we communicate and interact with others. With the advent of social media, many public relations professionals were concerned that the way we implement public relations practices would be forever altered. People had a new and best of all, free (or so they thought) way of sending and receiving messages. The mentality was, “Why pay someone to do it when we can do it ourselves?” Little did everyone know, social media is a very complex world to navigate and can be difficult, though possible, to show return on investment for using it.

Just because a new social media platform is out there, there is still no substitute for research, planning, implementation and evaluation —the standard public relations process.  Value is added when the process is applied to social media.

When it comes to Twitter, you just can’t put messages out there. If the messages aren’t engaging or they don’t encourage your followers to reply or retweet them, then the messages you are sending aren’t effective. Twitter is the place where your messages can be personal and professional. It’s important to be mindful of what you say on Twitter, but you want your tweets to have some personality. Take a note from the LA Times.

Third-party websites like Klout and TwitterGrader can offer some metric visibility to determine how well your campaigns or messaging is working, but you don’t want to solely rely on these for a fair assessment of your Twitter use. When TwitterGrader labels users as “Elite” or Klout labels you as a “Climber,” it’s not an exact measurement of how much you engage with your followers. It’s a computer-generated assessment of where you might fit in within the Twitterverse.

Twitter is a new way to view the world and to take part in a global discussion. It’s a great way to learn about what people are talking about and be part of the conversation.