Twitter is a revolutionary way to reach more customers, have conversations with them, keep them engaged with your brand, and eventually a place to mine and gather prospecting information — InsideView a Sales 2.0 company is already exploiting the information available on Twitter and making it available to sales reps.
As the uses for Twitter expand and it becomes another type of search engine the importance of it for actionable information to increase sales will grow.

I agree with Mr. Klein: if your customer base is on Twitter, than you need to be on Twitter. But how many people will stick with a program that’s sole existence is a quasi-egotistical infatuation (for the Tweeting author) and a quasi-stalker infatuation with the subscriber? As the TIME article states, you could pass a great news article on, or talk about what cereal you had for breakfast. If a business creates a Twitter account and begins to plug and market itself, the populace of Twitter will notice, and could become turned off–the account serves as a giant binary megaphone to which most people associate to a TV commercial. Twitter’s success with marketing comes from the CONSUMER which is why it works as a tool. Those passing the links along do so because THEY support the product they are linking to.

What’s my point? Simply put, Twitter reinforces marketing fundamentals: Its about the consumer, always. If you can connect with them, they will market for you….with whatever is available to them.

There are countless services sprouting up that will do things like email you a digest of all tweets that include certain keywords. So, if you sell a hot new alternative to Lucky Charms, you could tweet your site to anyone who mentions their Lucky Charms habit, etc.