JournalistTweets: Follow Journalists on Twitter

By Kyle Austin

As Twitter becomes a bit noisy with its growing popularity (and celeb status) more users are looking for ways to segment the groups of people they are following / conversing with. While this can be done using PeopleBrowsr or Tweetdeck, destination sites like AthleteTweets, CelebrityTweet and newly-introduced JournalistTweets are also becoming popular.

As I covered recently in response to the Wall Street Journal’s memo on Twitter guidelines, Twitter can be a powerful journalism tool for crowd sourcing and building relationships with readers. Other journalists agree. A survey by PR Week / PRNewswire found that 22% of journalists are currently leveraging Twitter for these purposes. A separate survey by the TEKgroup found that 38% of journalists would be interested in receiving corporate news via corporate Twitter handles. So as journalists begin to rely on Twitter for news and story angles, how can PR folks keep track of what their media contacts are tracking within the ever-noisy Twitter ecosystem?

Enter journalisttweets.com. Cision, a global provider of media monitoring, research, distribution, and evaluation services for the PR industry is positioning its free Web destination as a site for PR professionals which provides the inside scoop on developing news stories (WSJ’s newsroom excluded), by streaming and sorting Twitter traffic from top journalists around the world. (Update: Got an email from Gregory Galant, CEO of Sawhorse Media, who noted that they launched a similar service -  MuckRack.com – a month before JournalistTweets.com. Will have an update on their service in the near future.

This beta service delivers tweets from thousands of media sources in North America and the UK, organized by topic or region. It is also fully searchable by content and journalist name to quickly identify key influencers and issues. In addition, a “Top Tweeters” link displays tweets from frequent tweeters at media outlets.

I’ve given the service a quick run and I think it shows some promise. Although brands see better ROI delivering direct to consumer messages via Twitter, folks like myself – handling media relations for clients – have found Twitter to be a great tool for digital media relations.

I do like how JournalistTweets breaks journalists into different sectors (Business / Entertainment / Health / Technology). Actually, I think they should take it one step further. If they could start breaking it out by beats (i.e. consumer tech & gadgets) or even by outlet (i.e. New York Times) I’d be really interested in it. In fact, the latter is something that publications should turn into destination sites for themselves. I’m surprised that BusinessWeek, an advocate for the journalism usages of Twitter, hasn’t created a destination within Businessweek.com called “BWTweets”, which would track tweets from all of BusinessWeek’s editorial staff.

Anyways, I hope that Cision continues to consider adding these other features as I think it could be a good place to track the developments within newsrooms and find relevant media contacts (Cision 3.0 if you will). Of course, in the meantime the amount of journalists on the service needs to be added to (Cision does include a way for people using the service to suggest journalists to add) and they should work with the search functionality, which I was having some trouble with yesterday.

Nevertheless, a step in the right direction for PR services.

10 comments May 19th, 2009

Starbucks Brews Competition, One Tweet At A Time

By Molly Galler

I triple dog dare you. Starbucks knows you can’t resist a competition.

Which is why today, Tuesday May 19th, they are challenging you to locate their new billboards in six major U.S. cities and be the first to tweet a photo of the ad.

Starbucks, like any other smart brand, is embracing the social media phenomenon that is Twitter. Twitter, the free micro blogging site, allows users to share their thoughts, musings, or in this case, sightings, with the online community.

There is no doubt that Twitter is the online manifestation of “word of mouth,” and Starbucks recognizes that word of mouth reviews are among the most powerful. Just ask any restaurant that has been slammed on the review site Yelp. In an interview with Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times, Chris Bruzzo, Starbucks’ vice president for brand, content and online, says:

“The idea for the Starbucks photo contest came from watching what people already do on Facebook and Twitter . . . Each year, people race to post the first photos of Starbucks shops decorated in red for the holidays on Flickr, people vie to post photos that include multiple Starbucks stores in the same shot. It shows a level of connection to our brand that we wouldn’t have concocted on our own.”

Starbucks can quantify the connection to their brand by their 183,000 followers on Twitter and their 1.5 million fans on Facebook. The company plans to continue their social media efforts, with a new YouTube video series featuring coffee experts talking about what makes Starbucks coffee unique.

The company has been hugely successful with YouTube in the past. Its biggest success being the November 2008 election advertising campaign (which started on TV and spread across the Web) that offered free coffee to voters on November 4th (RaceTalk’s own Ben Haber covered the news).

In her New York Times piece, Claire Cain Miller describes:

“On the Saturday before the presidential election, Starbucks sponsored a single 60-second television commercial on “Saturday Night Live” advertising a coffee giveaway on Election Day. Starbucks then posted the video online. By Tuesday, it was the fourth-most-viewed video on YouTube, and people were mentioning Starbucks on Twitter every eight seconds.”

With new ad campaigns utilizing Twitter and YouTube, and a massive following on Facebook, Starbucks is hoping to ride the social media train all the way to the bank against a new, golden-arched rival.

In case you’ve been hiding under a rock to miss its advertising barrage -McDonalds is now offering several varieties of coffee drinks  and is putting their marketing dollars behind traditional television, print, radio and billboard ads (which Starbucks continues to leverage as well) to entice coffee fanatics to the home of the Big Mac instead.

So while it may be a level playing field on the advertising front, Starbucks clearly has a “social” leg up in the brewing coffee wars.

7 comments May 19th, 2009

What is Wolfram Alpha??

By Kyle Austin

Silicon Valley has been buzzing about Wolfram Alpha (currently in Beta) as the next Google killer. But what is it? If you haven’t given the new search engine a try (I compare it to Ask.com on steroids) I recommend you do. Andy Jordan has a great video over at WSJ.com (also embedded above) illustrating how it worked for him and some Columbia students .

1 comment May 19th, 2009