By Francis Moran

When we launched this blog about 18 months ago, I blamed congenital social media addict Alec Saunders for persuading me that I and my colleagues here at inmedia PR had enough to say that we should be blogging. Nothing we’ve seen in the time since would persuade me he was wrong; our blog has hugely increased our online presence, vastly boosted the ratings for our corporate web site, and both brought us interesting business opportunities and helped validate our expertise on others.

Now we take the next step. Twitter.

And, as I wrote in my very first Tweet, if Saunders is to blame for making me a blogger, then Scott Lake has to take responsibility for making me a Twit. Scott has been pushing me to join the twitterati for a while now, and last week, I did. You can follow me at @francismoran. The tipping point for me was this blog post from the folks at Velocity about how they use many different social media tools, including Twitter, to gain the greatest possible leverage for good pieces of content they generate for their clients.

Now, much as I like to claim to be an early adopter, I’m not terribly early to this particular party. In fact, I’m not even the first person at inmedia to start a Twitter account. That honour belongs to my colleague Linda Forrest (@lforrestinmedia), who wrote her first update in May last year and has been a bit more active while on maternity leave. (We all know that first-time Mums with months-old babies have oodles of time on their hands, right Linda?)

Scott has promised to drop by and give me a crash course in how to make the most of this interesting social media tool. For my part, I think I’ll use it for all the quick comments that seem to occur to me in the course of a week, things insufficiently detailed or profound to warrant a full blog post. We’ll also add a tool to this blog that automatically issues a tweet when we write a new post. I’ll tweet about other posts I read in my hundreds-deep RSS feed, participate in some of the conversations that are going in the twittersphere and, like Velocity, draw the broader web’s attention to some of our clients’ successful content generation.

As with our blog, we’ll keep you posted on how this goes. As a newbie, though, I’d be keen to hear from readers who have had good or bad experiences with Twitter, and how you use it.

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