In their latest marketing offensive against dwindling sales, Starbucks has announced an iphone application with a barcode feature enabling iphone owning coffee fans to pay with their handset.

It won’t make much impact in the UK just yet as it’s on trial at just 16 stores in Seattle and Silicon Valley, but boy the headlines, 93 stories on UK Google already. This begs the question, should the money for iphone app development really come out of the PR budget?

Such is media interest in iphone applications and Twitter, they should be a consideration for any digital pr campaign, purely for their headline pulling potential. Twitter has more reach – add Sarah Brown and Stephen Fry’s Twitter followers and you’ve already got an audience the size of all the UK iphone buyers since launch (around 1.5 million).

What an iphone application offers you that Twitter doesn’t, is an alignment with one of the world’s most popular brands. Some of the Apple brand magic might just rub off, something Starbucks won’t object to I’m sure.