The fail whale has become a symbol that sums up that twitter doesn’t take itself too seriously and that while no one is paying it’s become a victim of its own success! It puts a smile on your face that no service is perfect and that for a brief few minutes you can have a break from your tweeting.

This made me think how much do established brands who are engaging with their customers regularly (being a few tweets a day) rely on a single medium to communicate with their audience?

I can appreciate that Twitter enables people to engage with brands and if the worse came to the worst and Twitter went bust eyeballs would shift and advertisers would find another way to engage with their audience. However for marketers looking to use this data to measure and analyse behaviour of their users and plan a future micro blogging strategy, data security is crucial. There seems to be less consideration for accountability of data contributed to Mirco Blogging from brands and media owners, and more “how can we can get buzz about our brand now” with little consideration for the future.

With brands mining data in real-time for search results to give them an insight about what is being said in the now, brand monitoring companies are being called to respond in the real time, giving the media industry a mash-up between PR and SEO.

Some traditional publishers have had the model of “if you build it they will come” and this may have worked when people had less choice over what media they interact with, however now we have a start-up culture with low barriers to entry, it is ever more important that the user has a reason to engage other than self publishing which is no longer a new concept.

Advertisers have ignored consumers for too many years and it will be interesting to see if consumers are happy for advertisers to join the conversation or if it will do more harm than good!

If Facebook seems to have sent you too many invites to apps you’ll never use then Twitter is ultimately cutting through the noise by acting as a catalyst for people to share content simply and quickly. Hitwise sights related service Twitpic has the largest number of site users referred by twitter with an increase of 248% over the last 12 months, followed by Facebook. Brands have fought in the past over trade marking issues relating to misuse, however in twitter and Twitpic’s case a mutual partnership has helped to give a boost to both brands and add value to the user.