• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, August 30, 2010

That's what I took away from Jesse Engle's presentation this morning at the Social Media Insider Summit in Tahoe. Engle, who is general manager and co-founder of Co-Tweet, a company that is helping companies to fuel a presence on Twitter by creating employee-based Twitter accounts, explained how the process can help "humanize brands" by putting the face – or at least the Twitter handle – of real employees to real customers.

That sounds like a pretty good thing, right? So why is it helping to make me irrelevant? Well, because Engle presented Co-Tweet's case during a session on social media and PR, and he said the process is shifting the focus of companies from journalists to social media users. And as you may know, I'm a journalist. Or at least I will be a for a little while longer.

Co-Tweeter Jesse Engle