Could Twitter One Day Replace Email PR Pitches? Maybe

Over the last few months as I travel the country I have noticed that lots of people in PR that I meet are giving out their Twitter IDs in lieu of their email addresses. Many feature it front and center in their email signature. There's even a site that will generate a graphical version for you, which I have embedded above.

On a related note, more of my inbound and outbound communication these days is in the form of Twitter direct messages or, sometimes, public replies. The direct messages arrive through email, but I find myself often reviewing or responding to these in one of my preferred Twitter clients - either Tweetie or TwitterGadget.

At first I despised the bacn. Now, however, I embrace it. What's more, I have come to see the benefits of direct messages and its potential for PR. It has me wondering: can direct message pitches become an accepted practice that journalists can live with? There is upside for them.

For starters, just like with RSS, journalists are in complete control of the relationship. A PR pro can't direct message a reporter unless he/she is following. This means we have to earn our way on to a reporter's screen by providing valuable content, which many of us but not all of us do. Robert Scoble alluded to this in his recent note to PR pros. 

The key benefit here is that a journalist can always un-follow any PR professional who abuses the relationship. Still, with spam weaving its way into Twitter though replies, it threatens to put the whole kibosh on the plaform's potential for media relations (I am drawing a distinction here from direct to audience engagement via Twitter, which is very different).

Second, for the journalists and bloggers that do encourage PR pros to pitch them via Twitter they can streamline the process by keeping missives down to 140 characters. That's less than the three sentence format some are embracing. It ensures people make their point quickly. This makes it more mobile friendly too.

Now some pitches could be public tweets, others will have to be private direct messages depending on their nature. And of course Twitter will never replace email pitching entirely. 

Despite all the growth and hype, Twitter is still small. Pre-Oprah, Harris Interactive found that in the US, even among the ever-wired 18-34-year-olds, only 8% of those surveyed said they use Twitter. Other demographics break out down as follows: 35-44 (7%), 45-54 (4%) and 55+ (1%). Net, email is ubiquitous, Twitter aint. 

Nevertheless, more journalists are using Twitter. So this makes it increasingly attractive to PR professionals. It also makes it essential that we behave ourselves. A few bad eggs will kill this fast.

What's your view? PR pros, have you built relationships with reporters and/or enhanced them using Twitter? Journalists, I am sure you're worried about any such trend, particularly since many of you use Twitter for both personal and professional communications purposes. Weigh in with a comment below or reply to me on Twitter @steverubel. If there are interesting responses, I will round them up in a subsequent post.

Google's New "What's Popular" Feature Aims to Clone Digg

Google's personalized home page, iGoogle, added a new feature that basically clones the core features of Digg and StumbleUpon by embedding them into a gadget that is easily accessible from right within the web desktop.

The feature, which Google started highlighting in its directory this week, is called "What's Popular." Using the widget consumers can submit links either anonymously or publicly and rate whether they like or dislike other submissions.

According to Google's description, the What's Popular gadget "uses algorithms to find interesting content from a combination of your submissions and trends in aggregated user activity across a variety of Google services, like YouTube and Google Reader." 

That's just the half of it though. When you click on the maximize link the gadget expands into a canvas view that sorts submissions into different categories - e.g. stories, videos and images.

This won't be the last we see of Google adding social services to iGoogle. They are slowly adding such features to many of their products. Eventually I expect they will also follow Microsoft's lead in rolling up your friends' social content from around the web on Windows Live. (Microsoft is an Edelman client)

San Francisco Tweet-Up on Monday

Edelman is hosting a Tweet-up on Monday, April 20 from 6 to 8 pm at Sugar Cafe in San Francisco. If you're going to be in the Bay Area, you're all welcome to join us. Hope to see you there.

Twitter's Monetization Strategy: Developers, Developers, Developers

There's endless speculation about how Twitter will make money - and when. Twitter is really hot right now, making it attractive to advertisers for both outbound marketing and deep insights. However, I don't think Twitter will be able to build a long term, sustainable business through advertising revenues. 

The brief history of online communities (all 15 years worth) informs us that it's virtually impossible to make money around them. No one has been able to build a sustainable business doing so that has lasted more than five years. The reason is, people online are fickle. We come and go. This is why I wrote that Twitter is peaking - at least as far as in its ability to grow users.

What Twitter has done, however, that very few companies have achieved, is build an amazing platform that developers love. That ecosystem, if they invest in it, changes the game. 

Suddenly, Twitter is no longer a web site. Rather, it is becoming the web's first major social operating system. Twitter is to rapid fire online communication what Microsoft is to PCs, Apple and Blackberry are to mobile phones, Google is to search and advertising and Facebook hopes to become to the social graph. The numbers from comScore don't tell the real story. This BusinessWeek photo essay, which shows the innovation in the platform, does.

If Twitter invests in growing its platform and empowers developers to do more with its API (i.e. build profitable companies), it can create a remarkable business much as these other giants have before them. The beauty of it is they will never have to worry about the ever cyclical online advertising market or the fickle consumer who is in search of the next hot site. What's more it can spur all kinds of innovation, as the platform has already done.

This is the surest path for Twitter: mold the robust platform into a social OS and add premium services for developers and Twitter could become a giant business that weathers the ever-changing fickle nature of online communities. Choose instead to focus on growing site traffic and advertisers and it will fall prey to the same fate as The Well, GeoCities, Tripod, ICQ, Friendster and every community that walked before it.

So Twitter, be Microsoft, not AOL. Focus on the developers. Enable them to monetize and to grow with you. Become the Internet's first social OS and the rest will take care of itself. Do not chase Madison Avenue. Build the platform, monetize it with value-added services and inspire innovation and Madison Avenue and the rest of the world will plug into you.

AOL, ESPN, Others Seek to Bypass Google with Address Bar Searching

Above: AOL's relaunched Love.com builds curated, vertical sites all on the fly from the address bar. 

For years, when consumers wanted to find specific information they would go to a major vertical site like ESPN.com and execute a search. Google's growth, however, is changing the game. 

Today when consumers turn to Google to say, search for say Shaq, there's a ton competition their attention. It's coming from everywhere - Twitter, Google News embedded links, SEO-optimized brand sites, news sites and more. This doesn't bode well for major media companies that have built vast databases of content.

Several sites, however, are now looking to snatch their traffic back from Google by letting consumers easily execute searches from and curate content on the fly, all from the address bar. Three such sites include AOL's newly relaunched Love.com, ESPN and IceRocket. The goal is to make it easy to search from the address bar by tacking on a word to the domain.

Last week, AOL quietly launched an alpha of Love.com - a portal to topical content from around the web. Now, of course, you can search directly on the home page for any topic you want to track. AOL will build a site that curates content from you from across the web. However, the beauty of Love.com is that you can enter any term as a sub-domain and Love.com will build a site for you on the fly - even if it doesn't exist. For example, try shaq.love.com or twitter.love.com or even steve-rubel.love.com. The pages pull up news stories, YouTube videos, tweets and more.

According to an AOL spokesman, this is part of the company's effort to become an aggregator of content - a strategy that some feel is the future of media. Currently, there are 100,000 love.com sites live. AOL has plans to launch 250,000 in the next few weeks. The technology is being powered by Relegance, which they acquired in 2006, and is rolling out across its Mediaglow brands.

ESPN, meanwhile, now has an ad campaign running on air that encourages sports fans to search by adding a term at the end of their domain. The ad showcases that searching for former NFL star and now commentator Bob Golic (ESPN.com/bobgolic) turns up different results than for Serbian ping pong sensation Biba Golic (ESPN.com/bibagolic). The technology works nicely for pretty much any team or star - e.g. ESPN.com/yankees.

IceRocket's Big Buzz social search feature, which I am a fan of, also offers similar URL-based searches,according to founder Blake Rhodes. Simply add any su-bdomain and it will pul together a curated search. For example, try advertising.icerocket.com or easter.icerocket.com and IceRocket will build a nice site that includes blogs, Twitter, Friendfeed and more.

I suspect that Google will easily copy this feature very soon. They have the technology and I am sure don't want to see vertical sites grab any of their traffic, no matter how small. Still, this is a smart approach and I am sure that we will see more of it not just on media sites but in social networks (via redirects) and on corporate and brand sites too.