Let’s be honest about this, on the whole the PR industry is not welcome in social media. People consider their blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter streams to be their personal space, and they don’t want us oily spin-merchants barging in and shoving our brand messages up in their faces. Nobody likes getting cold-called when they’re at home, nobody likes clearing spam out of their inbox, and nobody likes it when a bunch of marketing suits crashes their social media party.

The PR industry has largely got itself to blame for this. We’ve not done a great job of protecting our own reputation and clearly differentiating professional, open and ethical communications from the kind of weasely propagandising that the public typically associates with the PR industry.

The irony is that while the general attitude seems to be that PR activity in social media is intrusive and undesirable, when we get it right people love us for it – as evidenced by this recent post at Mashable about brands successfully using Twitter.

The problem is that so many brands have blundered into the social media space, desperate to get a piece of the action, without really understanding what they’re doing and this has, understandably,  generated a huge amount of distrust and ill-will towards PR professionals. When somebody who’s never used Twitter or written a blog suddenly decides to incorporate social media into their PR strategy because they’ve heard a lot of buzz about it, you know that disaster and humiliation are just a few steps away.

Ultimately, people are happy to get involved in a dialogue with brands that they are interested in, and if the people managing a brand’s communications understand the right way to work with social media platforms, the outcome is positive for everybody involved. Consumers get to find out about stuff they’re interested in via the channels they prefer to use, brands get to create a valuable conversation with the kind of people they want to talk to.

Jumping blindly on the social media bandwagon out of a sense of obligation is counter-productive and will achieve precisely the opposite of what PR is supposed to do. Only by taking the time to understand how and why people use blogs, Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms can the PR industry hope to make a positive contribution and be welcomed by the audiences they’re trying to reach.

If you’re still struggling to understand why Twitter might be a useful PR tool, you should probably take a moment to understand the concept and implications of the phenomenon of re-tweeting. It’s a very simple premise:

• John finds something he likes on the internet, so he writes a Twitter post about it with a link.
• John’s friend Sarah follows him on Twitter, she reads the post and thinks it’s cool, so she posts it on her own Twitter stream for her followers to see (and because she likes to follow etiquette, she references John in the post so that he gets credit for finding something cool). This is a called a re-tweet.
• Sarah happens to be quite popular and has a couple of hundred followers on Twitter, they all see the Cool Thing that John wrote about and, say, 10% of them re-tweet the post onto their own Twitter feeds.
• See where this is going?

In the same way that the simple concept of forwarding an email gave rise to the viral marketing industry, re-tweeting turns Twitter into a hugely powerful word-of-mouth network – if you’ve got something interesting to say on Twitter, your message can reach a massive audience very quickly.

It should be easy to see how you can use this to your advantage: if you’ve gone to the trouble of building up a strong Twitter profile and earned plenty of followers, then you can confidently expect that whenever you have something particularly worthwhile to say it will be re-tweeted by a large proportion of your followers.

On top of this, tools are emerging to help you track the re-tweeting phenomenon, which can be very helpful for buzz monitoring and other research. Two of my favourite re-tweet oriented tools are:

• Retweetrank.com makes it easy to find out which Twitter users get their posts re-tweeted the most, and to find out how you (or any other) user compares to the top dogs.
• Retweetradar.com highlights the topics which are currently generating the most re-tweets across the whole of Twitter, using a simple word-cloud. The site also shows the top ten re-tweeted users and links.

As Twitter seems to be enjoying explosive growth at the moment, and is finally focusing on developing a sustainable business model, it’s likely that the platform will turn out to be more than the passing fad that many of us expected (guilty as charged – I was very sceptical initially). Anybody who continues to ignore the PR potential of the site is in real danger of losing ground to more savvy competitors.