Thursday, August 21, I attended the Atlanta Web Entrepreneurs meetup as a Featured Participant to discuss strategies for communicating and marketing on Twitter.

The group contained members of the interactive and startup groups in Atlanta from students, independent consultants and members of marketing teams from Fortune 500 companies.

Twitter is a free micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates, commonly known as “tweets.” Tweets are text-based posts, up to 140 characters. Tweets are posted to the Twitter website via SMS messaging, instant messaging or a third-party application.

I focused my portion of the discussion on approaches to marketing over a medium such as Twitter. Whenever you are planning or running a campaign via any social media website, especially one that encourages as casual a conversation as Twitter does, it is most important to be completely transparent in your motives. Are you trying to let your customers know that a new product is available? Is there a launch event approaching? Has new content been recently posted on your website?

Whether you are approaching Twitter as an alternative means to disseminate information, tracking what your customers/users are saying about your product or service, or just establishing your presence in the space, transparency is the key to all legitimate efforts on your behalf. Your customers will see straight through you.

Below is a general introduction to Twitter for marketers I created about seven months ago. Since publishing this, there are many new tools and applications available for marketers to assist in their updating, tracking and reporting of Twitter activity that is not covered in my presentation. The concept and purpose has not changed however and it does still provide a basic background on the service and it’s capabilities.

A large portion of the consulting I have been doing over the summer has been educating companies on social media platforms such as Twitter, helping them identify which platforms and tools are relevant and beneficial for them and from there, how to communicate effectively over chosen medium.

My next direction is to target the adoption of social media platforms like Twitter by public organizations, particularly local government, as a means of disseminating information to metro areas quickly, efficiently and effectively.