Twitter: Therapy for Graying PR Types

Recently, I have been feeling old. And it’s not the newly prescribed bifocals. I blame Twitter.

You see, I have always pictured myself an early adopter of emerging communication technologies. When I took my first higher-ed PR job—way back in the day, when my current colleagues were still in junior high—I ordered the first PCs for the public relations office and strung telephone wire above the ceiling tiles so we could share a printer. We started faxing our news releases instead of mailing them. In fact, I installed some nifty software that would automagically fax our news to regional media, even at night. Back then, this was cutting-edge stuff.

But somewhere along the way, I must have gotten a little complacent, a little too content, a little too self-identified as a PR guy with a geek streak. When the social media revolution burst onto the scene, I opened a Facebook account, but thought of it only as a place to play games with my kids. I avoided MySpace and shunned LinkedIn. I sniffed disapprovingly at Twitter as a refuge for the hopelessly self-absorbed: “I am sitting on the patio, folding socks.” Who cares?

Then it happened. Suddenly, last winter, Twitter was everywhere. Every trade journal, popular magazine, or PR rag I picked up had not one but several articles about Twitter as a business communication tool. This caught me completely off guard, and I didn’t quite buy it. I made casual inquiries of some trusted friends in the industry, asking if they had experimented with Twitter. Imagine my chagrin when I discovered that several of my peers had fully embraced Twitter as a means of reaching twenty-somethings. They had opened multiple Twitter accounts and had integrated the service with their news blogs and RSS feeds. My comeuppance was complete when I seemed to be the only one at a recent PR conference who had never seen anything like the Twitterfall projected at the front of the room.

It was like awakening with a start after falling asleep in the sun; it burned. Determined not to lose any more time, I jumped in with both feet. For several months now, I have been playing catch-up with Twitter. While the results so far have been modest, at least I feel that I'm back in the game, tech-wise. That’s good therapy.

Next Time: Discoveries of a Newly Fledged Tweep