In case you haven’t, Twitter is a “micro-blogging”, social networking site, where people can post anything they like, as long as it’s fewer than 140 characters.

Why bother? Well, once you sign on, write a (short) profile and find yourself some fellow ‘twitterers’ to follow, you can build up quite a network. And you it’s not like every post is about what you had for dinner.

Posts vary from links to weird and wonderful websites, to opinions about the latest political manoeuvrings, to pictures of Steven Fry stuck in a lift.

The question from many PR professionals is: “Can twitter do me any favours and how?”

To demonstrate how people can get full value out of their twitter account, Rohit Barghava has developed the Five Stages of twitter acceptance. According to Barghava, once you move beyond denial and mere presence, to active engagement, you then start to ‘dump’ information and this is where PRs need to be careful.

Using twitter as a dissemination tool for press releases has been much criticised, especially by journalists. This is because twitter, in its full capacity, is a conversation rather than a bulletin board. You can reply to other people’s tweets and forward tweets on to other people. You can post images and link to websites.

Equally frustrating to some journalists who are being followed by an increasing number of PRs, is those who join twitter and monitor it, but don’t post any comments themselves. While there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s probably not delivering as much benefit as joining in the conversation.

Once you start conversing, giving opinions, engaging other twitterers and sharing news, then you’re ‘microblogging’, according to Barghava. This is where the true value comes in, not just because now you have an authentic voice to distribute the occasional press release, but you’re also building your network.

That said, remember that you’re in a public forum and don’t rise to any inflammatory comments. These things can easily escalate as one PR professional has found out this week.