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Source: businesslink.gov.uk Digital marketing is reaching a tipping point - some 17 per cent of companies surveyed by the Chartered Institute of Marketing say that online advertising spend has now overtaken offline spend. Computer company Dell claims it made US $3.5 million in less than six months from Twitter using a viral system. Discount offers are posted daily for its followers, who then frequently re-tweet the offers, so attracting new followers. A recent survey from Performics and ROI Research found that '44 per cent of Twitter users are happy to be alerted about promotions and special offers by the site'. Forty-eight per cent had responded to an advert they'd seen, and, perhaps most startlingly of all, some 44 per cent of those surveyed had themselves become an endorser by recommending products they'd seen to other users. .

. Two-way exchanges are by no means the greatest source of information on Twitter. The biggest source is the entire Twittersphere, which is a real-time reflection of the activities, interests, actions, thoughts, sentiments and sometimes flight schedules of between 15 million and 70 million human souls. In other words: data. In other words. Let me try to frame the significance for you. Decision-makers actually rely on focus groups, which consist of eight to 12 random nimrods blathering on subjects about which they may not even have interest, much less knowledge, much less insight. That is not data; that is noise. A billion tweets a month, by contrast is a data mine. A data goldmine. Furthermore, each "data point" is a live human being. You can tweet back. not all information is merely gossip-licious. Twitter has been a crucial lifeline amid chaos in Moldova, Iran and, most recently, Haiti. An episode involving Ann Curry of NBC News at the Port au Prince airport comes to light.