I am what anyone may call a Twitter addict. There's no other term that could explain my condition especially after being responsible for having posted 12000+ tweets and having over a thousand followers! I post about fifty tweets daily and interact with over a hundred people regularly.

For the uninitiated 'Twitter' is a microblogging site that allowed users to answer the question 'What are you doing now?' and then share the answer with the world by 'following' users and having them 'follow' you back. However, this simple application today prominently features in every self respecting Social Media Marketers expertise list for the site has proved to become one of the fastest growing social media experiments in the world and with unimaginable applications.

Today Twitter has become everything from a social networking site to an alternative search engine to a vehicle for self propagation (which by the way is one of the biggest reasons why businesses and brands love Twitter)!

So, an update on Twitter is a tweet, someone copying your tweet while giving you credit is a retweet (not giving credit is considered rude), a DM is a direct or a private message while a hashtag are a community driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets (or simply a link which when clicked will show you similar tweets and begin with a '#' sign).

As the popularity of Twitter went on gaining strength, the brilliant team behind this simple application kept on making small subtle changes to the website to make the user experience more exciting. One of these changes was something called the 'Trending Topics'.

Trending Topics to explain simply is a topic, issue or a subject which is being tweeted about the most. Now mostly these topics could be something as simple as #followfriday which is basically one Twitter user recommending another one to his/her set of followers or it could be something though provoking like people discussing #climatechange.

However, more often than not trending topics reflect what the world is really talking about. Everyone's Twitter page reflects a list of the top ten trending topics for any given moment. It's an at-a-glance list that tells you who or what is making news and what the entire world is talking about.

#TigerWoods was there and so was #MichaelJackson and in recent times our very own #ChetanBhagat was seen trending at No. 8. However, trending topics was also the same feature that informed the world about #MumbaiAttacks, #ChinaEarthquake and #Haiti (which is still trending, when last checked at No. 6, as people try to raise relief funds). And just a few months ago, the world decided to celebrate #Diwali with us as wishes poured in from every corner.

Everyone's timeline (a twitter visualization tool that allows you to view your twitter feed in a timeline format or simply your tweets and tweets of the people you follow) was filled with 'Chal meri Luna...tic tic tic' or 'Tandurusti ki raksha...' followed, of course, by #IconicIndianads.

As people started tweeting and retweeting the hashtag, #IconicIndianads soon started trending at No. 8. As enthusiastic users went on and on, #IconicIndianads soon reached the third spot and within as less as four hours settled at No. 2! The highest a trending topic emerging from India has ever reached. This caused a lot of cheer especially amongst the Indian Twitterati as we all knew the guy who had started this topic. Kudos and congratulations followed. Indian Twitterville was ecstatic.

However, there was probably another group of people who probably should be excited about such Trending Topics...brands! Although this particular hashtag #IconicIndianads isn't really as important for individual brands to understand consumer reactions...however, it does create an exciting opportunity.

Adding to it's list of increasingly fascination features, Twitter has recently added something called Local Trending Topics which draw up lists of trending topics not all around the world but in a particular country and sometimes in a particular city! The feature was unveiled just a few days ago and is still under construction as Twitter is adding more countries and cities to the list.

Local Trending Topics could provide information required about who is talking about what and where at the click of a single button...a powerful tool which can help marketers measure not just the output but also the outcome of their initiatives regarding various brands and products. I am pretty sure some smart geek out there will create an application to actually come up with ways to analyse this data and create instant charts and other important statistics.

With user generated content becoming the reality of today's media, the knowledge collected from analysing this data could be a lot more accurate and useful than running expensive market research programs with focus groups and surveys. Although this may take some time, I won't be surprised to see something like that, at least in it's preliminary form already being used somewhere around the world.

Pretty soon, we will see a new mandate in every client brief to an advertising or a P.R. agency: Trend my topic on Twitter!!!

You can follow the author of this blog on Twitter here: @labellagorda