I’d be interested to know the differences in travel PR/ journalist interaction in the US – my experience is largely based on the UK and Australia.

I agree with everything you write. Twitter is simply another a channel, and all the same behavior rules apply. Whether you’re at a cocktail party, on email or on the phone. You listen, engage, add interesting content when you have it.

Having said that, we all have a mix of followers. I tweet on business related items as well as my personal interests. All in moderation so never to bore one side or the other.

Thanks again,
Lisa
@lisagerber

Unlike many (it seems), I’m not bothered about my press releases being personally addressed – feels a bit creepy, actually – and I’d rather that PRs made it easier for me to hook into press releases (and/or client info) on destinations/subjects/entities that I know are within my speciality. Why not offer RSS feeds for each of your clients, so that I can subscribe to useful ones, and dodge irrelevant bombardment?

On that note I wish there was an easy way to filter my Twitter stream – is there? I tried Tweetdeck but didn’t like the interface or lack of customizing options. Same as travmedia gathers all PR releases into one convenient package which I can scan quickly twice a day and pick out useful stuff at a glance, I want to do the same with PR tweets. Suggestion for tweeting PRs: how about adding a hashtag to client releases – say #client? That way, we can all talk together about stuff of mutual interest, but when you’ve got a release to put out, add a hashtag so we can identify and filter it as such. Just an idea. Otherwise I have to filter everything emanating from your Twitter ID…

I agree with you on Travmedia too. I’ll often only put an alert out there as a last ditch resort – the amount of clearly irrelevent emails you get as a result is astonishing.

My request was for a semi-pitch (the editor has requested I find some for him to consider), and TravMedia doesn’t allow you to post for pitches, so Twitter is very useful for this. Also, the PRs on Twitter so far seem a bit more savvy than some of the ones on TravMedia, and they never off-board bombard me with inappropriate answers (i.e. ‘I have no EU hotels for under £150, but there’s this great spa we’ve just opened in Oz…’).

Good work, Grumpy Traveller. Now let’s just hope all new Twitter PRs take heed.

Like I said, it’s all a learning curve. It’s interesting to take note of how people respond as we go along so we can adapt accordingly and make sure we’re providing what our followers want.

Seriously, I have to agree on the whole with David. Being constantly ‘spammed’ ends up turning me off going down the rest of the list of tweets since I last logged on. The same goes for publications that just automatically Twitterfeed their stories on the site and don’t include anything else.

I appreciate we all have a business view to get across – Lord knows I am conscious of representing Metro and that readers are also be following – but lack of interaction just cloggs the Twitterspace with a drone of noise, from both journos/publications and PRs.

I hadn’t considered that you may have consumers following you as well as travel industry types. Perhaps it’s best to use separate accounts? ie. one for Montserrat, one for Dominica etc that have a largely consumer focus, and one for Saltmarsh that is more travel industry focused?

In quick defence of the travel PRs though, if our Twitter stream is representative of the norm, we’re being followed by as many travel enthusiasts as writers, so while we take the point (and largely agree) that summarising press releases might be overegging the pudding for journalists, there will be times we’ll want to tweet about great deals or big news since we’re aware those notifications are being seen by potential customers as well as the media. Now we’ve got these methods of targeting consumers directly, our clients (and we ourselves) are keen to take advantage of that.

So I guess it’s a question of keeping the balance right, with occasional bits of news thrown in amongst more general debate, conversation and interaction. We definitely find direct replies work well and that Twitter is a great way of speaking to journalists for whom our emails are just a handful among hundreds.

Kate