Next to the App Store supporting Apple’s iPhone, I can’t think of any place more exciting and entrepreneurial in today’s media world than Twitter.

Not an hour goes by that I don’t read or hear about a new way to read, write, search, filter, evaluate and, yes, make money from the Twitter community.

What occassionally galls me are people who forget that they have an obligation to be upfront if the material they are writing is truly their own or if there’s some other motivation prompting them to tweet.

Luckily, many of the consumers of social media are pretty astute and able to out the hawkers who do too much pitching with a suspicious lack of bitching. 

What worries me even more than organizations that hire someone to talk up their cause or brand are those that use stealthy practices to make it look like they have captured the interest of the Twittering crowd.

The Dutch marketing consultancy Trendwatching,  founded by economist Reinier Evers,  tried such a tack with its latest research study.  Rather than publishing the data and using the above-board approach of sharing it with tastemakers, Trenchwatching acted like a carnival midway barker.

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, try your hand at winning a $250 Amazon.com gift certificate. All you’ve got to do is retweet the following text to your Twitter followers:

Check out trendwatching.com’s briefing on FOREVERISM: http://tinyurl.com/frvrsm

The sad part about Trendwatching’s “Annual Tell a Friend Giveaway” is that it was completely unnecessary.  The company’s “Foreverism” study on never-ending consumer and B2B conversations was top-shelf work and would have spread virally without hiring the equivilent of hobos to stand on street corners wearing Trendwatching  sandwich boards.