I’m going to hold my hands up…I’m not an early adopter. I’m happy for others to buy the first version of a new gadget or sign up to the next big thing online. That way, they get all of the bugs out of the way before I take the plunge.

So you won’t be surprised to hear that I wasn’t exactly convinced by Twitter when I first heard about yet. After all, blogging like this still amuses me – who really cares what I have to say? But microblogging, well that’s another level! I couldn’t imagine conveying anything meaningful in the 140 characters Twitter allows (you get 160 characters for a text message)

But this is 2009. Grammar is losing all relevance and copy writing in a traditional sense is a dying art. But at the same time it is a new challenge and one that requires a lot of skill. We all know that if someone asks you to explain who you are in 10 words, that is a far harder than rambling on for 100 or 1000words. And so it is with Twitter. You have to be concise – get straight to the point and forget the formalities.

But I do wonder who really needs to know that I’ve just come back from a meeting and am now preparing for a conference call. Probably no one, but with data protection issues and privacy laws at the forefront of many marketer’s minds, Twitter is like gold dust. Why? Because Twitter is the ultimate opt-in marketing mechanism.

You see, people sign up to follow your Twitter stream (or “tweets” as individual posts are known). So if you want to tell interested parties that a new product is available, you post it on Twitter. You have a service problem, post it on Twitter. You are running a special promotion, just tweet.

Sounds simple, but be aware – nobody wants to have sales messages shoved down their throats, so use Twitter effectively to give people useful information as well as marketing information. They’ll soon stop following you if you don’t and your tweets will eventually go unread.

But if there is any doubt about the current power of Twitter, think back to the airliner which recently crash landed in New York’s Hudson River. An eyewitness snapped some photos on his mobile, and uploaded them to Twitter. Within moments the photo had gone global, whilst all of the major news networks were still desperately trying to get camera crews to the scene.

Is Twitter a fad? I’m still not sure, but a lot of people are squawking about it at the moment…