Even if you’ve been living in a cave, you have probably heard of Twitter.

As a person that is somewhat obsessed with travel, the majority of people that I follow on Twitter are companies and influencers in this industry. Twitter has grown to become a major resource for travelers, as it is easily accessible for the ever-expanding number of smart phone users around the world.  The site also offers access to real-time feedback from other travelers and may eventually replace the bulky guidebook.

One category of travel companies on Twitter that is well-represented is the airline industry. Every major carrier, both domestic and international, has a presence on Twitter. As a PR professional, one thing I find to be interesting is looking at how the various domestic airlines communicate to their followers on Twitter.

In my opinion, there are only a few airlines that truly shine on Twitter, injecting humor and fun into their tweets, posting photos, fully engaging with their followers, being a travel industry resource and also a customer service resource for travelers when needed. Virgin America, Southwest Airlines and JetBlue fit in here.

On the other hand, you have other airlines that do what I would consider to be ‘the basics’ – tweet about sales, reply to some customers, and post the occasional industry link – but there is just something missing, that special spark. United Airlines and US Airways come to mind.

To me, the difference that I have found interesting is how the perception of the ‘fun’ airline personality on Twitter seems to be directly related to the airline’s mainstream popularity among travelers.

Last year, both the Travel + Leisure World’s Best Awards 2009 and the Condé Nast Traveler 2009 Readers’ Choice Awards ranked Virgin America, JetBlue and Southwest Airlines in the top 10 for domestic airlines. United and US Airways are nowhere to be found on either. Also, as of today in the voting for Budget Travel’s Readers’ Choice Awards, the three airlines in the lead for Favorite Airline are (you guessed it!) JetBlue, Southwest Airlines, and Virgin America.

Perhaps this is a ‘chicken or the egg’ question – are these airlines popular because they’ve communicated a fun brand on Twitter, or were they able to create this fun persona because they were already popular?

Regardless of which is the case, even an airline that is loved by over a million followers can suddenly find itself in the middle of a social media firestorm, as was true in the recent Kevin Smith vs. Southwest Airlines fiasco. As CNET’s Caroline McCarthy points out, this was another example of how communications and customer service departments are finding themselves having to work together to get the message out when social media enters the scenario.

And it’s my belief that since Southwest Airlines was a meaningful part of the conversation about their company before the Kevin Smith drama, the resulting effect was ripples instead of tidal waves.

So the next time you fly, thanks to Twitter, you may pause when considering your airline of choice – proving that Virgin America, JetBlue and Southwest Airlines are solid examples of how brands can communicate with people on Twitter through engagement that creates a sense of personality and, ultimately, increases their overall likability as a company.

There are plenty of misconceptions floating around about the PR profession and industry in general.  Many of these misconceptions are only altered for PR professionals when they are in school studying PR.  For the rest of the world, these misconceptions may never be addressed.

In my mind, we can thank pop culture for many of the mistaken beliefs about PR.– Samantha was supposedly in PR in “Sex and the City,” but I don’t think I ever saw an episode in which she worked with a member of the media, outside of gossip columnists.  Jessica Biel’s character in “Valentine’s Day” was in PR and we really only saw her in her office running on a treadmill and eating candy.  And of course, right now there are a slew of PR-related reality TV shows on the air including “Kell on Earth” and “Spindustry.”

These shows and movies — good or bad – are certainly a guilty pleasure of mine, but I also think they have begun to beg the question of how much impact pop culture has on my profession and the PR industry in general.  Is there any truth to these shows from a PR perspective?

While I can say that none of these pop culture representations persuaded me to study public relations in college – they have an impact on many students in recent years., We’ve interviewed countless intern candidates hoping to work in the music industry and plan parties, among other things that I rarely — if ever — do as a PR professional at a top-ranked agency.

With this in mind, here are some ways that these shows and movies are creating false understandings of what PR really is and three things others should know about the industry. 

1.) We don’t just plan parties: Yes, Samantha on “Sex and the City” may have done that and yes, there are opportunities to coordinate launch events and parties – look at the iPad launch for example.  When first released, iPad was covered by an outrageous amount of journalists, but the key to such astounding interest wasn’t because Apple threw a raging party, it’s because the company and its PR team had something to say and a new, exciting product to showcase. 

PR is about just this — getting our clients in the news in a positive light in order to generate interest for their target audiences — not just making sure they have a rockin’ party for their newest gadget, product, restaurant, etc.

2.) Part of PR is acting like a salesman:  In Valentine’s Day, a reporter — Jamie Foxx’s character — comes barging down Jessica Biel’s character’s door to get information from her.  I can honestly say that I have never had any reporter banging down the door to my office, demanding information about a client.  In truth, a majority of the time, we’re reaching out to reporters to schedule meetings, bringing our clients to their office.

I was once told that every job has an aspect of sales in it and PR definitely falls under that philosophy.  You’re selling your clients, their products and their story to the media.  PR people make follow up calls to gauge a reporter’s interest on a story angle and there’s always a chance we’ll get hung up on, but it comes with the territory.  The key to being a good PR ‘salesman’ is being smart about what you’re sending to the media and ensuring that 1.) It is relevant to the topic(s) they cover, 2.) Relevant to the media outlet, 3.) Relevant to what is happening in the industry and/or news cycle.  When you don’t follow these rules, that’s when you hear “click.”  Which brings me to my next point—research.

3.) We track news topics and industry trends to get our clients in the news:  This is something you’ll never see in the movies or on TV: We read and follow loads of news outlets.  That means everything from the Wall Street Journal and New York Times to Travel + Leisure and Cosmopolitan. 

Why is this important?  So we can identify the right reporters to pitch our clients’ news to and understand how different news outlets present their news.  For example, the Seattle Times has a regular feature column called “Interface.”  This column regularly features a general overview on local companies and gives us, as PR professionals, an opportunity to suggest our clients for consideration.  If I didn’t regularly read the Seattle Times, I would have no clue about this opportunity for my Seattle-based clients! 

While these shows and movies get some things wrong in my opinion, they do highlight one of the keys to being a successful PR professional – establishing and creating relationships.  That could be with a potential client, a fellow PR person, a reporter and a client. 

“Kell on Earth” is a good example of this.  During a trip to London Fashion Week, Kelly is shown sternly asking people to move out of several front row seats during a fashion show because they were reserved for American press that she had invited.  PR is about creating relationships and for the media, making sure that they have all of the information and resources they need to write a story – whether that means getting a front row seat at a fashion show or providing an interview with a client spokesperson that has expertise on a topic they are writing about.

With all that said, are these shows creating loads of misunderstandings about PR?  I haven’t fully decided, but I know it’ll be refreshing when I tell someone “I work in PR” and they no longer say “Oh yeah, like Samantha Jones, right?”  Sigh.

My good friend Mr. Biggs over at Crunchgear.com just wrote a novella about (my words) the future of on demand programming vs. the bloated channel line-ups most of America is forced to purchase with cable.

While I agree that this is ultimately a losing scenario for cable companies, I think that the majority of Americans are still in the rosy glow of HD programming and HD On Demand that there is still time for cable companies (or telco companies) to look at changing how they do business. But how should they evolve?

Telco companies are certainly evolving to bring more choice into the market. But as much as I love AT&T UVerse, at the end of the day (no offense to the engineering marvels here), it’s just an IPTV version of what cable is offering. Same content, same channels, but with some nice multi-room DVR controls.

But it’s still just a box. A box that does not play well with other content services — not to mention my own personal content.

So I have a TiVO and the future promise of a hacked Apply TV to solve some of these issues. However, I am not a case study for the average American.  Most American are still discovering the joys of time shifting with their cable (or telco) DVR.

So there is still time to evolve. But not much time. As more and more of the Gen-Y are getting jobs, their first apartments, and getting married, there better be some changes — because they will  will gladly choose iTunes On Demand to get their shows pushed to their TVs than pay for 200 channels they don’t want.

When Cable first arrived, people never thought people would pay for what they got for free (read this great article on the history of cable television). Well they did. And over time, the networks have lost a lot of power to the original “paid” programming offered by Showtime, HBO and others. And cable became the 800 pound gorilla in content distribution.

So what’s keeping things from evolving as fast as we are? When talking about cable companies, a lot of this is technology driven, a lot of this is copyright (see my previous post on copyright/drm and content), but a lot of it is that the modern cable company is a giant network of regional operations, mom and pop acquisitions, and nightmare processes for rolling out new programming — not to mention the customer service issues. It’s a monster with many heads where even something simple can not be simply integrated.

This gives a leg up to AT&T, which has brought to market the first IPTV offering with its remotely controlled home network. A network that update itself and easily role out new services. Lets give them a chance and see what happens!

In filmed entertainment all the technology we need to share, move, and enjoy content on any platform imaginable is already here. The only thing we are waiting on is for the Digital Rights Owners to get it together.

Having said, this is a vastly complicated issue that requires action on the part of the owners (including their agents, lawyers, managers, promoters) 3^rd party sellers, their various intermediaries, and even all those artist unions. It’s an alphabet soup of crazy.

This is why intellectual property rights are the single biggest issue facing digital content distribution. Until it’s figured out, we’ll continue to get access to only a small layer of available content. This is why the channel line-up and on demand selection appears to be exactly the same whether you download it on your laptop via Amazon or access it via On Demand through cable, IPTV or satellite, et al.

With all that said, I was a little disappointed with Jonathan Miller’s (News Corp.’s Chief Digital Officer) answer to a question about copyright at today’s Tech 2.0 summit in San Francisco.

Q: Talk about copyrights.

JM: We need to have copyrights that are expected. Even in China they realize that. They have a budding content industry too. They’re very interested in copyright and piracy. I think we’ll have an Internet that respects copyright.

I get that News Corp owns a lot of content (you’ve heard of 20^th Century Fox, right?). We get that they have more freedom to move their own content around on their various holdings. But what the world needs now is more open debate about a global standard focused on letting people decide for themselves how they want to consume content.

For example, with mobile broadband speeds increasing, the need to side load content (move it manually from your computer to your mobile device) is becoming more and more unnecessary. In the future all this content will be managed in the “cloud,” and you will be able to simply push pause on one device, such as your TV, and push play to continue watching on another device, such as your laptop.

Does this mean that when we figure all this out that consumers will stop using the Internet, peer-to-peer services, usenet groups, etc. to get their content for free? No. But as any consumer survey will tell you, the vast majority of people want (and will) pay for digital content.

The industry needs to work together to figure this out. They need to focus on finding new ways to make more money, not obsess on the certain possibility that some people — people that would never have purchased the content legally anyway — might get access. It’s like a grocery chain closing down because they have a few shoplifters.