Even with 60 million people riding it, there’s still room on the Twitter bandwagon. While you’ll never care about most of these people or anything they have to say, there is a rich exchange of IT ideas occurring on this service. Check out “virtualization,” “cloud computing,” “data security” and “green IT” to see what I mean. And, most of the OEMs have active Twitter presences, including VMWare, Citrix, Cisco and EMC.

So, Twitter has marketing potential: relevant audience, reach and intelligence/analytics (we can help you with this last one). With a touch of common sense, it’s hard to do anything “wrong.” However, it can take some planning to generate a marketing impact you can measure by ROI. The first step is to understand what Twitter isn’t.

Twitter, basically, provides directions; it tells you where to go. When you market using this tool, you’re basically giving your followers a reason to go somewhere else: your website, blog, LinkedIn group or Facebook fan page. Think of Twitter as a prospecting tool. It helps you find targets. Then, you cultivate the opportunities in a content-rich environment – using the right mix of blogging, newsletter marketing and social media platforms – until it’s time to set up a meeting and close the sale.

The hype around Twitter is intoxicating, and much of it is warranted. You just need to recognize what it is and use it as such.