Managing your online marketing assets didn’t get any easier when Twitter stampeded onto the scene a couple of months ago. The newest, and in some ways the most intriguing, social media limits messages (tweets) to 140 characters. So, like, where’s the value? Lets see if we can break it down.

Online communication – and really, that’s how the bulk of business is conducted these days – revolves around e-mail, web pages, blogs, RSS and social media sites like Facebook. Twitter, for not so obvious reasons, may be the missing link in connectivity.

It’s lightning quick. Posts are limited to 140 characters, which means a quick scan for followers. It’s the equivalent of writing a headline instead of a term paper; if you can master the craft, a great tactic for driving a new web link.

Reporting on Twitter tends to focus on the, “I just woke up! OMG!” socially driven outburst, and that’s ok. The commercially driven side that’s just beginning to flow from organizations, manufacturers, retailers, causes – is quickly becoming a very powerful tool that’s able to reach very large audiences effectively and efficiently in a real time communications model.

The trick is to make sure your audience can easily find and “follow” you. Young audiences now receive their information almost exclusively from social media – Facebook, MySpace: and now Twitter. E-mail remains a prime form of one-to-one communication, but the one-to-many model has shifted dramatically to the social media platforms.

Where e-mail is fly fishing, tweeting is cast netting. And sometimes that’s exactly what you’re after.