A valuable lesson from the @prweekuknews Twitter feed (just not the lesson I expected)

This week I was going to write a post about how bad the PR Week UK Twitter feed was (it does nothing more than push headlines out, etc etc), about how PR Week seemed to lack any knowledge of how to engage people through social media, and how as a result the magazine and website were likely to lose credibility and readership because their main audience (PR professionals) wouldn’t value the advice and reporting of a publication that didn’t seem to practice what it preached.

@prweekuknews Twitter stream

I was going to post about that, but then (thankfully) I took a closer look at the Twitter feed in question, and discovered that it wasn’t actually an official PR Week account. It’s just an RSS feed of all the news that PR Week UK publishes, set up by a helpful person who (as far as I can tell) has nothing to do with PR Week at all.

That left me needing to come up with a new blog idea at short notice (argh!), until I realized that there’s still an important lesson to be learned from the @prweekuknews feed. That lesson? Monitor. Monitor not just what people are saying about you, but also whether people are saying things for you without you knowing it.

@prweekuknews is saying things for PR Week, and in doing so, may be harming PR Week’s reputation. I’m fairly confident that of the 14,000 other people following @prweekuknews, at least a few of them (and probably more than a few) also thought that it was PR Week UK’s official Twitter account (or at least thought that for a while). I’m also pretty sure that a decent number of people were also unimpressed by “PR Week UK’s” tweets, and, consciously or not, thought less of PR Week as a result.

Like any brand, PR Week should be (hopefully is?) monitoring Twitter and other social media for any mentions of its brand, considering what those mentions mean for the brand, and taking action or getting involved in the conversation where appropriate.

In this situation, I think taking action is appropriate, since there’s a danger that the PR Week brand could be harmed (even if only slightly) by this feed. Not big action – like trying to shut down the account, which would be silly since it’s an entirely labor-free additional communication channel for PR Week at the moment – but something small like thanking @chris_reed for setting the feed up and asking him to include a little more information in the bio, making it more clear that it’s not the official Twitter account of PR Week UK.

Of course, the alternative lesson here isn’t that PR Week needs to monitor social media and consider the implications of all mentions of its name more deeply, but that I should pay more attention to bios of people I follow on Twitter… (I now do, this was one of the first ‘people’ I followed on Twitter when I first joined).

I think they’re both valuable though – be careful who you follow, and monitor (and consider all of the implications of) what people are saying about you and for you.