Twitter: Marketing Tool or Public Relations Godsend?

I've seen a few articles cropping up this afternoon about how a recent WebTrends survey shows that only 2% of companies use Twitter as a marketing tool. Personally, I'm surprised the number is that high.

When you look at it, Twitter is a social media application. By definition  the term "social media" generally refers to methods to "facilitate communication, [and to] influence interaction between peers and with public audiences."* Therefore, to paraphrase and expand a bit, Twitter as social media application is best used to open lines of communication with a public audience, regardless of whether that public audiences is friends and family, businesses, coworkers or even customers. To me, that's also a pretty decent definition of "Public Relations".

Now, I can't sit here and say that there aren't more full-fledged marketing potentials for Twitter, but a company has to really sit down and plan out their strategy around Twitter (or any social media application for that matter, including Facebook and MySpace). Do you want to blast out promotions and incentives to followers or do you want to use the medium to connect with customers and open a dialogue? For example, by managing your brand and reputation via Twitter search you can address issues, both good and bad, in almost real time. By opening that connection directly to customers you also set the expectations of your existing and potential customer base - you are being proactive in how you address issues, actively seeking out your customers and interacting with them versus waiting for them to contact you. In fact, I would argue that by using Twitter in this way companies will be more profitable and more successful with their implementation versus using Twitter and other applications as just another means to distribute promotions and discuss deals. People want to BE social in their social media applications - they don't need just another method of receiving junk, that's what email is becoming.

Whichever way you look at it, flaunting the fact that companies aren't using Twitter as a full-fledged marketing tool (which, to me, reads as "pushing their latest sale and/or promotion") is akin to discussing how they're not using their online Help Desk applications as marketing tools. Sure, you 'could' use Kayako to tout products and services by embedding ads in various places, but that's not its primary use. Neither is Twitter's use primarily in marketing - it's in conversing, and more importantly, LISTENING to what is being said.

*While it's not the greatest for defining things, my definitions of "social media" and "Public Relations" were taken from Wikipedia. At least it's better than quoting FoxNews ;).