I admit it. I am a Twitter newbie and still navigating my way around this particular social media platform - only yesterday my very online savvy husband explained with a good deal of patience what a hash tag is. In case you're also not sure, hash tags are inserted in front of words in Twitter conversations to make them searchable - rather clever and a quick way to access and listen to live conversations about products, brands, events or anything that interests you.

I really became hooked during the SWC - I found it more interesting to follow soccer commentary from fellow Tweeters than the commentators themselves, and it also proved to be extremely useful if I wasn't near a television or radio at the time! The fact that we can choose to listen to each other rather than outside mediums is a sign that the social media phenomenon has tipped the scales in a huge way towards citizen journalism. Traditional media influence as we know it has shifted and as PR's it's imperative that we're aware of the influence of social media and embrace it, or risk being left behind.

Back to Twitter, as a recently joined member of the Twitterhood I found this post by Philip van Zyl interesting as well as entertaining - a few ground rules to bear in mind perhaps?