Can you really say that Twitter is a 'personal' place when anyone who wants can follow you and in doing so invade this space?

Ged, thanks for adding to this discussion. Actually I think brand engagement strategies are slightly different and can be effective as they are about a new channel for D2C consumer conversations. Whereas with the media there already is a professional channel for communication via phone, email etc.

@Annabel Kerr Perhaps it was bad paraphrasing by me, but I think twitter's a more personalised conversation as opposed to more formal work communications, don't you think?

Pro's can certainly pitch on twitter then immediately culled. I cull my list onn a regular basis and if the level of interaction or responses are below standard then off they go. It is not about the number of followers but the quality of the interaction, information and comment. You can tell the PR twiiter accounts that are just paying lipservice, the re-tweet the same messages hour on hour. The PRWeek twiiter account falls foul of this very rarely engages in an interchange of ideas. Shame really.  

I agree on the whole but some journalists are now claiming they will only accept pitches by Twitter. If that's the case then your humble PRO has little choice in the matter...

On pitching to journos, I generally feel a bit awkward about pitching with the rest of the community watching. It's like chatting someone up with all your mates watching. DM is better, but only works, of course, if journos follow you. This way, it acts like a bit of a filter. Journos like it at the moment because it's much lighter in load than email, which kind of broke for pitching ages ago.

On brand engagement Ged, I'm not sure I agree with that one. The idea of Twitter is that it's an open forum for following and you can always block those you don't like. I know some companies actually care about what people are saying about them, and Twitter's a very good litmus test.

I consider Twitter to be like a conversation with your friends down the pub, its done in the open but if you had a shift or unpleasant looking character eveasdropping then you may feel a bit uncomfortable about the process.

I think that brands need to think carefully about how they select who they listen to. I have had a number of followers based on keyword triggers rather than a broader context consideration. How could these keyword trigger followers ever be 'useful' to me?

I hope that adds a bit of colour to the comments above.

Considering a good deal of journalists try and get exclusivity for stories, I find it curious that they should want to receive pitches via Twitter.  Unless it's a DM (which is not that different from an email - especially with all the 'join my mafia family' spam) then a twitter pitch is straight into the public domain in my view

I personally think it's another example of social media gone mad, especially as most of you have pointed out if it's in the open for everybody to have a good gawp at. DM might be a more sensible and feasible option but then why not just use the email? Not sure I would be entirely happy pitching to a journo like that.....on the other hand though....it would be interesting to see how these successful pitches on Twitter evolved. Anybody had luck with it?