PR Day Jobs of the Twitter Famous

I’m very selective about whom I follow on Twitter. My “strategy” seeks to capture authoritative voices in media, marketing, PR and technology. Conversely, here are three sure ways to get un-followed:

  • Twitpic an image of what’s on your dinner plate;
  • Fill my Twitterstream with excessive, ho-hum check-ins via FourSquare;
  • Overly and overtly promote your employer or your clients.

To that last point, many PR industry pros use their spheres of influence to benefit the agencies or vendors that employ them. Who can blame them? Isn’t this the raison d’etre for the social media marketing set? I even suggested in a previous post that the size of one’s “following” might even accrue to his or her career fortunes, depending of course on how much value a prospective employer assigns to that metric.

I thought it would be fun to create a top-ten list of some of the more socially engaged PR industry peeps and their special interests:

10. ValerieSimon (@valeriesimon, following 4241, followers, 4777) Employer: BurrelleLuce Media Monitoring and Measurement; Lead role in organizing #PRStudChat.

9. David Armano (@armano, following 5885, followers 26,064) Employer: Edelman Digital; New to that agency, and a savvy social media persona whose tweets of late tend to revolve around his new employer.

8. Soraya Darabi (@sorayad, following 1005, followers 467,605) Employer: Drop.io, Presslift; Recently left the social media trenches at NYTimes.com, taking her massive following with her.

7. Sarah Evans (@prsarahevans, following 13,645, followers 41,407) Employer; Sevans Strategy, Pitch Engine, Elgin Community College, and a welcome fixture on the social media scene.

6. Jason Kintzler (@jasonkintzler, following 7,216, followers 10,740) Employer (founder): PitchEngine; Jason is an indefatigable promoter of the PR story-packaging service (platform) he founded in the wilds of Wyoming.

5. Mickie Kennedy (@ereleases, following 19,593, followers 17,812) Employer (founder): eReleases; Uses his Twitter feed primarily to curate and share PR-relevant content (and, to his credit, less to advocate for the press release distribution company he founded).

4. Brian Solis (@briansolis, following 2477, followers 50,238) Employer (founder): FutureWorks, but with interests in PitchEngine, BuzzGain, and others. A prolific blogger, author and authority on the changed PR/marketing landscape, Brian is a ubiquitous presence on the social media circuit. You’ll find him of late chatting up his new book Engage.

3. Mark Ragan (@markraganceo, following 14,485, followers 14,625) Employer: Ragan Communications Inc.; A constant (automated?) presence on Twitter, and savvy curator, re-tweeter of all things PR with an emphasis on content and conferences produced by his company.

2. Amber Naslund (@ambercadabra, following 26,199, followers 27,822) Employer: Radian6; Amber is actively engaged in the social graph and is a mainstay on industry panels, albeit on Radian6’s dime. Ahhh, if only the other conversation monitoring companies had someone with her following.

1. Peter Shankman (@skydiver, following 596, followers 57,002) Employer (founder): HARO; They broke the mold with Peter Shankman. (But we knew that based on the name of the PR firm he once led, Geek Factory.) The prolific and personable proprietor behind HARO, Shankman’s Twitter followers get a heavy dose (sometimes too heavy) of his worldly travels and death-defying adventures.

Happy Twitter trails.

1 comment

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