PR Chicago

Tweeting as fast as I can

OK, I admit it. I am a former Twitter naysayer transformed into a Twaddict. I'm still trying to figure out how this social medium will evolve as more and more people discover it. What kind of tweeter are you?

• The Depressed: "Ate a bad clam" or "Feeling sad today." Sigh.   
• Tweeting for tweet's sake: "Got up." "Ate breakfast." "Went to lunch." "Saw a movie."  Scintillating. 
•  The Overachiever: "6 a.m. Just ran 14 miles, mixed up a protein shake and finished another chapter in my book." I might just join the ranks of the perennially depressed after reading these kinds of posts.    
• The Guru: Lots of folks are experts, gurus, mentors and coaches. I may be feeling inadequate.  
• The Educator. Love the tweeters with tidbits of information, articles, research, news items. 
• The Constant Retweeter. It's like cable reruns. Enough, already!  
• The Seeker. Finds the quirkiest and most interesting articles and links. One of my favorite tweeter types. 
•  The App and Product Tweeters. I'll check your stuff out if I have time, but does it always have to be about you? 
• The Autotweeters.  Save time, automate the process and bug your followers. It didn't take long for someone to figure out that you could tweet all at once and have an app spread your tweets around throughout the day.
• The Non-followers. I don't follow everyone (why would a surfer dude be interested in anything I have to say?), but I follow most people who follow me. When they don't follow me, I feel snubbed. That's just silly, I know.  

If you feel like it, follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/prchicago

Blogs, Drifting

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

What is a hobgoblin, anyway?

While berating myself for failing to post, I've noticed quite a few blogs, seemingly abandoned and floating aimlessly through cyberspace. Some tout long-shuttered restaurants, or refer breathlessly to events from the 90s.

Now I'm hardly the soul of consistency, but shouldn't bloggers be required to clean up their detritus after, say, a year or two? Pretty soon we'll be encumbered with piles of blogging driftwood as folks lose their initial enthusiasm.

Which brings me to the PR focus of this rant. So many corporate web sites I visit exhibit this same lack of consistency. On some, news releases haven't been posted for years.  What does this tell the media? That nothing's been happening? That you let your in-house PR staff go and don't think you should communicate anything to the outside world?