Yay or Nay: Is Twitter a valuable, viable benefits communications tool?

It's no secret, the world's gone a-Twitter. Whether being used to communicate with friends, colleagues or like-minded strangers, the social networking site Twitter experienced 1,382% growth between February 2008 and February 2009.

With more than 7 million registered users, no doubt you and/or many of your employees are among the twitterati. As employers continue to struggle to engage employees in benefits communication, it's hard to ignore the potential for reaching that many people at once. Stay tuned for an EBN report on one company's success in communicating via tweet.

So, does your company use Twitter (or a Twitter-esque medium) to communicate with employees? Would you consider doing so? Is Twitter just a fad -- as one of my colleagues called it, "the mortgage-backed securities of communication" -- or is it a valuable, viable communications tool with staying power? Yay or nay?