Our fellow founder, and ex-partner, Mat Morrison was profiled in PR Week this week. I kindly described him as “the kind of loose cannon you want on deck, because you never know where the targets are.”
Mat was profiled in part because he recently had the temerity to publish a league table of where different PR agencies stood in terms of their usage of Twitter. What is marginally interesting is the ‘storm in the tweetcup’ but what is more interesting is Mat’s methodology for gathering and analysing the data.
The league table was assembled based on each participants’
- Date joined Twitter
- Number of Friends
- Number of Followers, and
- Number of Updates
You can see the assembled stats here.
I think it’s probably the depths of self-promotion to be the first to comment on a post about oneself. For this I am ashamed.
The idea of a league table is (as we know) one of those bits of linkbait that never really fails to grab attention.
And to bastardize Alexander Pope’s lovely line, the proper study of Twitterkind is Twitter. That is — the one thing you can almost guarantee will be spread around on Twitter is… news about Twitter.
That said, I still something to be said for using Twitter penetration, popularity (and average date of adoption, say) as a marker for an agency’s digital ambitions. But it’s only that — a marker.
This was (IMHO) never about “who gets Twitter?” It was perhaps about “who is trying to get Digital?”