Traditionally when we come into contact with any of the main media channels e.g. television, radio, papers and magazines etc, we've become familiar with the actual 'content' that we were interested in being interrupted by obvious commercial advertisements. This model has followed us onto the web - we're all used to seeing adverts on the sides of websites, popping up, dropping down and so on.

Many of us are using many social web services for free e.g. YouTube, facebook, Myspace, and we sort of expect to be advertised 'at' as part of the deal. There are however many new kinds of channels that are being generated by the users e.g. blogs, and micro blogs, that aren't subject to this old model of promotion.

These new kinds channels could still let you tell people what you do, but can also let you learn about your potential customers, because they provide a platform for exchange and sharing of information. This could not only help you to better cater for customer needs, but it gives out a better chance to build up a less threatening relationship with your customers - blogs are a good way to do this.

Micro-blogging provides an opportunity to do this provided it is done carefully.

Micro blogging is essentially blogging but on a more 'intense' scale - there a lots of short posts, lots of comments received and sent frequently. Twitter is an example of this.

After signing up at the website twitter.com (which is a short process) you can let other users know (via email, mobile phone etc) in lots of short posts or "tweets" exactly what you're doing and planning to do. You can send email invitations, and add your thoughts to theirs, ask questions or post events.

Twitter says that it enables you to stay "hyper-connected" with a system that allows you to essentially "follow" exactly what the people you are in contact with are doing at any time, or be followed, and anybody can stop following at any time.

You can search for friends who are signed up to Twitter, and build up lists of friends. There are even websites that show who the top users of Twitter are (based on how many followers the have) - see twitterholic.com

The huge numbers of followers shown will give you some idea of just how popular Twitter is becoming. Although there are large numbers of Twitter subscribers, you are likely to be only posting to a small amount of people (your followers) with your 'tweets'. The more interesting your posts are to your followers, the more likely they are to keep following.

This has implications for using Twitter for marketing purposes. If you were to start posting obviously commercial posts, quite apart for risking being seem as a spammer, and being blocked or kicked off the service, you are likely to lose followers very rapidly. There are still however lots of blogs and websites out there giving advice on how to use

Twitter for marketing, for example, try typing "marketing using Twitter" into Google.

As is so often the case with the Web, whatever we do or think in 'real' life, it is reflected there, and in this sense it's natural that we should want and be able to use social websites for marketing and commercial purposes.

If you're interested in or already a subscriber to Twitter, you may want to explore the many other social 'microblog' websites out there including friendfeed.com or www.plurk.com.

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