Q: What's better than a blog about lame twitter marketing?

A: A website about rappers on Twitter.

Q: What's worse than lame twitter marketing?

A: A blog about lame twitter marketing. 

I asked a marketing colleague the other day if she uses Twitter, and she responded that she really didn’t have the time and besides, who’s interested in what she had for lunch?

I asked the wrong question, which should have been, “Do your customers use Twitter?" A  quick search showed that they do, and in the last few hours they had provided some interesting insights about her brand.

One conceptual stumbling block about Twitter is the “Why do people care what I’m doing every given second?” question, but that has two answers.  One is to stop thinking about Twitter in terms of you and what you are doing, but as mother lode of what other people are doing and thinking, starting at any point in time and moving back as long as Twitter has been saving their tweets.  If you aren’t sure what Twitter is, don’t start by tweeting your own comments, or even by following the tweets of any one person. Start at http://search.twitter.com and look up something about your industry, company or product. If it is a real timely topic, you’ll actually see the tweets scrolling by. Twitter also has links to trending topics, so you can see what lots of people are talking about right now.   You can do all this without even setting up a Twitter account. Once you understand how the search feature works, you can incorporate it into your standard marketing intelligence playbook, along with things like Google Alerts. One insightful marketer uses Twitter to develop personas that characterize their customers.   If you use an RSS reader, save your searches and check them periodically.

Of course, once you’ve passively used Twitter, you can get an account and start following people who you find during your searches that are contributing content that’s interesting or relevant to you. And, finally, you can start tweeting about things yourself, that roll up into the voice of the crowd. That's the second answer.

Who’s interested in what you had for lunch?  You’d be surprised.

As the results of the U.S. presidential election hit the nation on the evening of November 4^th, it led many to analyze the strategy and effectiveness behind the winner’s campaign. Undeniably, the Internet was an influential force in this historic race, and has become a part of the evolution of mass media’s role in politics.

It began with families huddled over the radio listening to FDR’s Fireside Chats in the 1930s. Then came the Age of Television, when the famous 1960 debate of John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon was heavily influenced by the visual juxtaposition of the candidates. Those that may have been positively impacted by Nixon’s radio speech had a very different effect from the televised debates, where Kennedy’s photogenic look appealed to the masses.

And now we are in the Age of the Internet, where the viral power of the Web has enabled mass political messages to be heard through a plethora of outlets.

As the Clickz.com article title states, Web ads mattered more than ever in the 2008 election. From candidate fan pages on Facebook, to Obama and McCain profiles on MySpace, to personalized YouTube video messages, the Internet is an extremely pervasive medium for reaching the national and global audience in the political sphere.

It is also evident that Obama’s strategic online social network presence may have significantly aided him not only in fundraising, but in uniting his supporters and reaching out to younger, more tech savvy voters.

As NPR’s Scott Simon spoke with Techpresident.com co-founder Micah Sifry, predictions are being unveiled about Obama’s online presence now that he is President-elect. Check out the interview podcast!

So, can we still expect emails signed “Barack”?