AdAge and others covered the story of how Land Rover is planning to use Twitter.

Two things make this one unique.

First, Land Rover is including #hashtags ( #LRNY ) in their online and offline twitter marketing promotions. I guess you could say that #skittles was first to really do this as a brand marketing effort, but it sounds like Land Rover will take it further in terms of promoting the tags. While Land Rover is ‘pushing’ users to their tag, Skittles ‘pulled’ users with their Twiter search results page for their tag. My guess is that the Skittles strategy will be more effective but their brand is also better suited for that approach.

The second unique aspect (for a major brand) of Land Rover’s marketing on Twitter is that they are using Twittad as part of the campaign. Twittad is putting a twist on things by ‘partnering’ with existing Twitter users to leverage their followers. It sounds like they take over the users’ Twitter profile pages for a period of time and may send tweets to their followers and then the users are paid. It’s not immediately clear how the users are selected – for example, based on relevance to the topic or to maximize reach / minimize duplication, etc.

Land Rover is not likely to remain the only national marketer doing this for long, said James Eliason, CEO of Twittad, the Des Moines-based “social-media affinity network” Wunderman tapped to boost Land Rover’s launch.

Twittad may sound good at first, but it’ll be interesting to see how users respond. The model will almost certainly need to evolve in order to provide true, quantifiable value to their clients. Just because it’s inexpensive doesn’t mean it’s a good deal.

Kraft’s DiGiorno brand pizza has teamed up with PR firm Weber Shandwick to leverage Twitter to as part of its launch of a new pizza. The Twitter marketing plan is to identify influential Twitterers and deliver pizzas to their tweetups.

“We’ve always been out there with a lot of different media touch points, with a combination of online and offline,” Tom Moe, director-marketing for Kraft’s DiGiorno brand, told AdAge. “We’re always looking for the newest and most relevant places to be in both areas, and we thought this would be a great offer to combine with Twitter.”

Can’t knock them for trying, but we’ll definitely be watching this one carefully. There are way too many opportunities for it to go wrong. We can only hope that they’ve worked through a lot of potential scenarios – positive and negative.

We hope that the DiGiorno marketing folks are sincere. That they engage with the Twitter community. That they understand that they are making a commitment that shouldn’t be dropped after their initial launch. Last but not least, we sure hope that our they prove our first thought wrong – that this entire exercise was driven by the opportunity to generate some buzz by throwing ‘Twitter’ into the launch plan.

If you haven’t heard about the race between Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) and CNN (@cnnbrk) to 1,000,000 followers on Twitter you must have been camping in the woods for the past week. Ashton was on Oprah (@oprah) and got her to send her first tweet – how can you ignore that?!

While millions of people still don’t get it, this is a BIG deal. This has nothing to do with Ashton himself. You don’t have to be a fan of his work. It’s about a major shift in control that’s taking place. Ashton definitely gets it as he explained in his live victory broadcast last night.

“The old guard has passed and the new guard is here.. We can and will create our media… We can and will broadcast our media. We can and will censor our own media ourselves. We are over a million.”

It was a defining moment for media and the buzz and retractions have already started.

Obviously, we’re huge fans of Twitter. Watching Ashton live last night was more exciting than watching the countdown to 2000. But, as my wife likes to point out, not everyone thinks it a big deal. That’s where Mr. Kutcher’s ingenious marketing head kicked in. He knew that there must be a way he could leverage the media attention that the race was getting. What originally started as a joke could end up saving millions of lives – seriously.

That little video spawned the David vs. Goliath challenge that had us on the edge of our seats. Ashton brilliantly leveraged the attention to support a cause that is obviously important to him – ending malaria. He committed to make a donation of 10,000 nets to protect people from the disease and that started the ball rolling. Already, many high-profile folks have matched or exceeded Ashton’s donation. Oprah committed 20,000, CNN matched with 10,000 and it’s only been a few hours.

It’s safe to say that the organization Ashton is supporting, malarianomore.org, is seeing more visitors and donations than ever. The charity acted quickly to capitalize on the attention. Realizing that most of their traffic would come as a result of the Twitter news, their site has prominent tie-ins to Ashton and Twitter, they make it easy to follow and donate and they even promote Twitter profile backgrounds to help spread their message.

As a marketer, you have to appreciate it at so many levels. Here at Tweamr, we talk a lot about ‘harnessing the power of Twitter.’ Could there be a better example? Congratulations Ashton on a job extremely well done.

Here’s a recent example of the blurring line (if there is any real line) between using Twitter for personal and professional purposes. I’m sure there are many more. What have stories you heard?

In this case, a PR professional was on his was to make a client presentation. Apparently he wasn’t very impressed with the location, Memphis, and made his feelings known with a quick Tweet. At least I hope it was quick (versus well thought out.)

You can probably guess how the story ends, but it’s still worth reading the letter that the client sent as a response. This is my favorite part:

Additionally Mr. Andrews, with all due respect, to continue the context of your post; true confession: many of my peers and I don’t see much relevance between your presentation this morning and the work we do in Employee Communications.