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It’s a strange new online world since Twitter plunged into the internet pool way back in 2006. Even though most people’s first reaction on being introduced to the social application is “…why?”, still the micro-blogging networking site has taken the internet community by storm.

Twitter enables short messages to be broadcast to a public timeline but more importantly to the users private network of ‘friends’. Although there are users who are twittering for purely social reasons, keeping tabs on friends and family within their group, savvy marketers and public relations companies are joining the site in droves.

A marketing campaign on Twitter is a delicate balancing act. Too aggressive and it will backfire and cause resentment and irritation amongst those you are trying to court, too soft and the campaign won’t trend or go viral.

The very rapid exchange of information that makes Twitter such a unique and powerful tool for social communication can also make it a campaign killer should it be turned against you.

One example of this is Starbuck’s recent attempt to run a contest via Twitter in which the winners would be the first to post photgraphs tagged with specific hashtags (which are used on Twitter to identify topics). The anti-Starbucks campaigner Robert Greenwald hijacked the campaign by snatching the hashtags that Starbucks had identified as keys in its Twitter campaign and using them to post photographs of disgruntled Starbucks employees.

A successful Twitter campaign was that run by the company, Moonfruit . They offered ten 10 Macbook pro computers to be given out to ten of the most creative Tweets using the term ‘moonfruit’. The campaign washed through Twitter like wildfire, capturing the imagination and competitiveness of Twitter users across the world. The #moonfruit hashtag stayed at the top of Twitter trends for 10 days. So much so, that many significant news stories were swamped and the potential for marketers to choke Twitter with commercial messages became obvious.

Where once not so long ago in real life but a long, long time in the strange world of online marketing,  Twitter hashtags were a way of following topics that were being talked about and tweeted organically now as said by Rory Cellan-Jones in the BBC dot.life technology blog, “…forget “#iranelection” – or even “#andymurray” – from now on the trending topics are likely to be “#winbigatpoker” or “#loseweightnowaskmehow.”

To many of the Twitter community, it would be a shame indeed if this unique social communication tool was taken over by the corporate giants. In fact, for many of them there is only one reaction to that idea: #RMMF (raise my middle finger).