You may have started to find that people you follow on Twitter are appending the hash-tags #in or #li to their tweets.

Basically, what has happened is, Linked-In (www.linkedin.com) has started integration with Twitter allowing its members to make their Twitter feed available to their Linked-In profiles.

Unlike many similar integrations, Linked-In allows you to select all Tweets to display or just the ones with the #in hash-tag appended.

A word of warning, Linked-In say that you can append #in or #li in their newsletter, but in the settings it only mentions #in, so if you want to feed your tweets into Linked-In be safe and stick with #in.

As an example, I just tweeted the following post. You can then see it displayed in our Linked-In status without any copy/paste or other nonsense. Very cool!
Don’t forget, appending the #in hash-tag to your Tweets will save you time as you don’t have to post the same status to Linked-In also.

Feel free to connect with me on Linked-In at http://uk.linkedin.com/in/fasttrackit

On the 16th to 17th October 2009 the Internet saw a new trending topic. Promoted by Social Media Marketing of Atlanta GA. People were told far and wide to post to Twitter, Facebook and on their own blogs the hashtag #beatcancer.

Superb sentiment and with 209,771 recorded posts, a superb result, which is now being proclaimed a world record. Twitters' search of the hashtag reported that eBay/Paypal and MillerCoors would be donating 1 US cent for every recorded hit. Well as far as we can tell, all three companies could afford to bump that up to a nice square dollar, but hey, I'm not one for spending other people's money!

So what now? Although the intention in this case was obviously sincere, what's going to happen next? There's enough SPAM on Twitter as it is, all we need now is a bunch of copycat marketers "Trying to beat the world record". Suddenly you're being asked to tweet #abcelectrics because they want to hit the 300,000 recorded mentions.

I know it's grumpy and perhaps a bit sceptical, but I just hope we don't see an overuse of this strategy, at least, save them for the really important things.

Having said that we got involved with our partner iPhone App iCamWait which donates 10% of pre-tax profits to a number of charities one of which is the World Cancer Research Fund. So at least we can say we did our bit, however #abcelectrics? Well Goodluck if you do try I guess!

So Twitter is all the rage! its in the news, on the web wherever you are and is now on your phone along with other PDA devices. Wow, what growth!

Many companies are now using Twitter to engage and connect with their customers and prospective customers. Its a great tool, not to sell with but to introduce with! What I mean by this is that it allows your business to start a narrative, a conversation, with your customers and potential customers. Many businesses use it for feedback, others for alerts and notifications. Some also use it for plain old, down your throat marketing.

We are going to extend our discussions on Twitter over the coming weeks and months, for now, we just want to share a few things with you.

Firstly, why not follow us so that we can keep you updated on our news. Our profile is http://twitter.com/BeginInterMktg 

Next, and this is really cool, you should take a look at TweetAdder its a really cool Twitter automation tool which allows you to schedule things like Tweets, Follows, UnFollows, Messages and a whole lot more. Even if you don't like the look of it, you should visit the Tutorials page and watch the first video at the bottom of the page. Note, there are 2 sets of videos on the page, watch the second lot. The guys have used a computerised voice, we just cracked up! Hey TweetAdder guys, why not voice over? Great product, really nasty voice over though :o)