A couple of weeks ago we decided to launch a new Twitter account, our third, at @BlogHerDeals. [We already have @BlogHer and @BlogHerSupport.]

This post is really about explaining why we did that, asking what you think of it, and exploring other models for companies, not individuals, using Twitter.

I confess: I may have been an early Twitter-adopter (early 2007) but I was not an early Twitter-lover. I grumbled that I didn't really get it for quite some time. But eventually I became one of its biggest defenders. I have been known to say in interviews that Twitter is poetic. And the way to learn that which is most uniquely and unguardedly me. I have been impressed with how quickly you can see a community respond on Twitter. I have been impressed with how links in Twitter drive immediate, and robust, traffic.

But therein lies the rub. It's oh so immediate and powerful and engaging. This makes it a great communications and distribution and marketing tool, but a few marketing tools (of the human kind) can use that power for evil, not good.

And we're all individuals, with a different line between good and evil.

From the beginning, our @BlogHer account has been about the content and community and conferences. We link to editor posts and member posts and share information about the conferences. At some point we launched @BlogHerSupport, mostly for @ replies to people who had really specific questions. Especially questions about the publishing network that were applicable to only a segment of our community.

Once our @BlogHer account started to grow its follower base, of course the team members who support our advertisers and sponsors wanted to send messages about those advertiser and sponsor offers to our community.

And we started this little process where we would decide if an offer was "tweet-worthy". (I hope I'm not the only one old enough to remember the Seinfeld reference contained there, right?)

Sure, a $1,000 grocery gift card would be of interest to just about anyone, right? And if we clearly marked it as an offer from a sponsor, then it was both well-disclosed and tweet-worthy. But what about smaller offers? Or more niche offers? And really, how many such well-disclosed, tweet-worthy offers could you do per day without turning a content and community Twitter feed into a commercial Twitter feed? We decided one per day was a max.

But it still felt like there had to be a better way.

Then we realized that, of course, we already knew what to do. It was sort of like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz...the answer was there all the time. And the answer for us was to treat our Twitter presence the same way we treat our own web community site. As Lisa explained so clearly in her post about the proposed FTC guidelines, we believe in disclosure yes, but also the importance of context and appropriate separation of editorial and sponsored content.

So, @BlogHerDeals was born. A Twitter feed for all the offers we had, big and small, general or niche. Since Twitter is opt-in, we knew that no one would be seeing those tweets unless they chose to follow us. And if they didn't think the offers were compelling enough, they could unfollow us. It was that simple for us.

Is it that simple for you?

Because other companies have other ideas. A company (and marketing approach) currently in the news is Moonfruit.

Mashable calls it Twitter promotion done right.

But the IT Pro Portal thinks Moonfruit hashtag attacks shows potential weakness of Twitter.

Certainly the #moonfruit references seemed ubiquitous in my Twitter stream for days on end. And while it didn't kill me, I didn't love it either. And it didn't drive me to look up Moonfruit or admire their presence as a trending topic on Twitter. (Can I be honest: I don't get the trending topic thing. Who cares? Do people really go check out trending topics and then do something about it??? OK, back to the topic at hand...)

And Jillian, a commenter on my own Worker Bees Blog post about Twitter as a free market enterprise (where we all get to control the signal and the noise) says:

"As for BlogHer's approach, honestly, I think that's the way to go. #Moonfruit feels spammy and is nearly unavoidable (unless you filter out the tweets with Tweetdeck or Mixero!), but I follow a number of dedicated marketing accounts and have had great experiences doing so (my favorite is @UnitedAirlines, an airline I don't even fly regularly, because they offer cheap "twares" to their followers!)

The great thing about dedicated accounts is that, aside from retweets, they don't enter your feed if you don't want them to."

I don't know about you, but I do fly United, and went and signed right up!

If you read my Worker Bees post, you'll see it's about a recent phenomenon of companies trying pay-per tweet. With various methods of encouraging those tweets and different methods of proposing disclosure and identification.

Is that OK if you use a #spon tag?
Is it OK to require someone to tweet as the only way to enter a contest or sweepstakes?

I mean the Twitterer chooses whether to participate, right?

We've decided for now that we don't like the idea of requiring people to tweet to enter one of our contests. We've decided for now that that is forcing people to spam their community.

Do you agree?

Or do you think that you still control the signal and the noise; it's a free country, and you will simply unfollow anyone who doesn't strike the right balance in their Twitter feed?

Because we also know that this is pretty new territory.

So, what are your thoughts on Twitter, Marketing and Tools?