The reason they are not “the new press release” is that this is too simplistic – not everyone is a geek, yet anyway. It assumes Twitter offers a well-targetted audience for your publicity (be it customers, influencers, bloggers, media), and that this format is the best one for communicating the publicity message (other than “look at my publicity message here” where the above factors all apply, except that you loose a significant proportion by asking for a click). I don’t beleive this is the case. Certainly at this point, its worth some experimentation.

http://lead2020.blogspot.com/

The nice thing about Twitter, you can always unsubscribe if someone is too self-promotional, without providing any entertainment, insight, usefulness, companionship, etc.

I don’t think it’s either/or, and further, because it’s opt-in, you can cull the folks you find less interesting or too pitchy. Right?

Doesn’t matter what the new social media toy of the moment is, it’ll be taken over soon enough by someone like Coke or Pepsi trying to sell something to the rest of the users. How many brands have their own MySpace and YouTube pages?

As for what I see on Twitter, seems like everyone posts links to things they think are interesting for the most part. Not sure there’s only one way to use it. At least you can decide to follow who you want and not be hit up with requests to “Check out my friend’s band!”

Scobel already had enough of a following, so naturally they would migrate to Twitter. It’s not like the guy’s begging everyone to add him. It’s courtesy for the most part, but he doesn’t have to do it.

Jumping on Scobel though for PR tactics? Consider Seth Godin. Follows nobody, people follow him. Every tweet has a link to something–which links back first through his website so he gets the traffic. No updates about daily life as you might see from pretty much everyone else on Twitter, who for the most part, do rspond to others and engage in conversation.

TO each his own though. Lots of uses, like I said.

Besides, as a tech guy, I would expect Twitter to be the kind of space he’d live in and tell readers about. There are a whole bunch of agencies and consultants talking about social media sites that don’t even know how to spell Twitter, let alone use it. I find out about what’s new from either friends or a Scobel, Kawasaki. As long as people find out, doesn’t matter who they heard it from.

What about political candidates like a Barak Obama though? At last count, 5,013 following him. Certainly, their intentions are less genuine when trying to be wherever potential voters are in MySpace, Twitter, etc.

By the way, how was the traffic on this post after Scobel mentioned it on Twitter? Good, bad?

;-p

Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks are a new forum to share information, but it’s such a fine line between a pitch, spam, and news.

While I don’t think social networks are the new press release, I do believe that they are “new wire services” however a la BusinessWire and PRNewswire – just to different groups of people.

And I NEVER miss someone who uses “@scobleizer” in a message because Twitter puts those on my “replies” page which I check every day.

And using the new “Track” feature I can make sure I see everything on a single topic. Like, I can see every message that has “Microsoft” in it.

I tend to post rarely, since I am not a “celeb” I do not want to over twitter those who do follow me. I used it to PR other projects or just to share random stuff. But unlike a press release, key people who have chosen to follow me do read the stuff I post, therefore it can have an impact.

The small format also makes people write in a focused manner, which is not common in a press release.

Twitter does not have mass appeal outside of those who are very active in other social media (most folks do not regularly utilize it), thus it still has limited use in the form of getting info out, so I dispute the press release idea. It is just a new format that is hot right now (think Blogs three years ago). Time will prove out how valuable Twitter will be and how it will be used.

http://blogkatt.blogspot.com

I’ve definitely seen a trend among social networking users to engage in a lot of shameless self-promotion. It’s gotten to the point where I’ve turned off the tweets of many Twitter users.

While I’m not saying that those of us with something to promote should not promote these things, I don’t think tweets or other social networking activities should be based solely around self-promotion. After all, promotional content is the same as advertising, isn’t it? Why would I want to tune into someone’s tweets if all I could expect was a constant stream of advertisements?

The only social networking site I participate in is Twitter and I participate for its social aspects — not its marketing capabilities. I’ve made real friends on Twitter. I’ve also been notified of interesting content elsewhere on the Web by Twitter users. But of the 50+ people I follow on Twitter, not a single one of them posts more self-promotional content than other content.

Fortunately, Twitter and Twitter tools such as Twitterific make it easy to filter out the self-promoters and keep things social.