Twitter scams are proliferating like wildfire on the Net- 100FOLLOWERS A DAY! they promise – and this one, TwitterTrafficMachine, a couple of bozos who say they invented a system to automatically increase your Twitter followers. mytweetfollowers.com is another one that automatically controls your Twitter with re-tweets to their site – @Stock_Tweets is having a hard time turning off those malicious auto-Tweets.
All this supports the false notion that hundreds or thousands of Twitter followers lends you credibility, popularity and the power to influence others. Twitter is easily manipulated and tends to gravitate toward the fleeting inane comment generated by obsessive compulsive Twits whose only purpose is to generate more followers, no matter who they are.
On the other hand – the media is really taking to Twitter and it is proving to be a viable alternative wire service. Some journalists troll for sources through Twitter: APRealEstateLooking to interview someone who bought or sold a home in the Dallas metro area in April or May. Email asainz@ap.org. Some journalists, who have a conversational style and an underlying mission, manage to convey a real personality in 140 characters or less. My favorite is Nicholas Kristof:
NYTimesKristof @Kholmpartiet Poverty of spirit: people who express themselves not by personality but by displaying the latest i-Pod. 18:15 PM 19th May | NYTimesKristof It’s odd to return to the U.S. from African villages. So much wealth here, yet often accompanied by a poverty of spirit. 16:18 PM 19th May.
Twitter is also proving to be a resource for what journalists are thinking and doing: mattbish Had editorial lunch with JP Morgan ceo Jamie Dimon who was surprisingly upbeat (Matthew Bishop, The Economist). As one client astutely observed- journalists are now openly offering opinions trough social media.
The exploding popularity of Twitter and its usefulness as another information stream is forcing companies to hire in-house or freelance Twitterers. See NYTimes “Tweeting Your Way to a Job“. Wells Fargo is the latest to launch a customer service Twitter stream, complete with several real-life Twitter personalities who answer basic banking questions. Others in the banking business have jumped on the bandwagon: See USA Today story about customer service and banking on Twitter.
JournalistTweets is the the first (claims Cision) Twitter journo aggregator. You can follow tweeting journalists according to segments - Business | Entertainment | Health | Technology
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More and more, my conversations with journalists includes a survey of the PR job market (can’t be worse than journalism!?). This week, editorialists and bloggers debated the blurring lines between public relations and journalism. See Reason magazine column arguing that PR could become the next investigative journalism| And there’s The 21st Century Journalist: PR by Day, Reporter by Night? by Renay San Miguel.
NYPost: Portfolio.com taken over by American City Business Journals | Worth magazine re-launches June 1. See story here.
When you have a $250 million property, you go to great lengths to protect it.
press. 
The rapid demise of traditional media is fueling a new media stream, most notably on Twitter, chronicling day-by-day media death blows. The merciless axe fell today on Conde Nast’s slick business mag Portfolio, launched two years ago during boom times with lots of fanfare and a big budget. Peter Kafka, wsj.com ‘All Things Digital’ 
This week The New York Times reported that the The New York Times Company was considering 
I first went to Seattle in 1971. Fresh out of high school, looking for adventure, escaping New York City, everything about the Pacific Northwest was new, including the local newspaper we all read – the Post-Intelligencer. You come to rely on a newspaper to inform, entertain, capture the personality of the region and to give you the tactile pleasure of ink on newsprint, an essential morning ritual. You read the P-I on the ferry to Bainbridge or the Halfway House in 
The Obama administration also boosted its ratings because of this episode. Gibbs did not respond to Santelli entirely off the cuff. He periodically peered down as if he was reading message points. His nearly five minute response to Santelli was clear, concise and specific. On a broader scale he was answering all critics of the homeowner mortgage stimulus. Despite a sudden rash of attention, Gibbs neutralized Santelli, who will sound like a hurt kid in the schoolyard desperately vying for attention if he continues this tack.
PR? It’s murder.Can U.S. public relations influence the outcome of a murder trial across the Atlantic? The battle over Amanda Knox, dubbed Italy’s ‘Trial of the Century,’ ramped into high gear last week in a courtroom in Perugia, Italy. This story has it all – a vivacious American coed from University of Washington in Seattle, an alleged drug-fueled orgy that led to a grisly murder, conflicting testimonies and relentless spinning of stories to paint the accused, accomplices, prosecutors and legal authorities in a bad light.