I’ve stayed out of the PR Week Twitter debate. It’s not that I’m shy, nor that I am shocked that PR Week has started a debate. It’s just that I’m working on a big project and it has been keeping me occupied.

Equally, there’s little to add that other PR bloggers, commentators and general gobshites haven’t already said. Or Twittered. And agencies moaning about being poorly ranked should smarten up and modernise rather than acting like a bunch of teenagers.

So let me try to bring in another perspective: size doesn’t matter.

By that I mean it doesn’t matter how Twittery your staff are, it’s what you do with it that counts. I’m not going to make a big deal out of our firm having lots of people on Twitter any more than I’d boast about how many phones people have on their desks or in their pockets. It’s just another communications medium.

But a damn good one. So the question for me is, which agencies are really using Twitter to boost reputation – and ultimately impact sales – for the clients? Few, probably. But those that do are onto a good thing, and good on them. Perhaps PR Week should do a listing of the least digital, least accountable and most luddite PR agencies in the UK.

I suspect if you asked PR agency staffers to do timesheet entries for everything they Twitter (unrealistic, yes), they’d struggle to recharge large chunks of that time to clients. That said, Twittering (like the phone) with journalists does involve asking them about the curry they had last night or whether Newcastle are (correct grammar, see appropriate media style guides) going to be in the Championship next year (doubtful).

I’d like to see the debate tackle the commercial realities behind how PR agencies use Twitter. If there was ever a time to prove the financial value of PR in its adoption of a new technique, it’s now.