May 7th, 2010 
Maria Helm 
Large companies such as McDonald’s and IBM often boast marketing budgets comparable to a third world country’s gross domestic product. So how’s a small business owner to compete?
The answer is short: in 140 characters or less.
Well, who hasn’t heard of Twitter, a free micro-blogging service that lets users share “tweets” — brief text messages less than 140 characters long that subscribers or “followers” can read and redistribute? Twitter’s popularity is booming. With about 75 million users who send more than 50 million instant instant updates a day via computer or mobile phone, it’s a classic case study in frequency and reach.
No surprise, then, that industry leaders such as Starbucks (@Starbucks), Dell (@DellOutlet), and Zappos (@Zappos) all use Twitter to drive direct sales, offer promotional discounts, and engage
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