I was very interested in Mashable’s ‘Top 40 brands to watch on Twitter’ this week, but have to say I was a little disappointed to see such a focus on US companies, as we all know that Twitter is global. I started thinking about this seriously, and reeled a few European brands off the top of my head with a prominent presence on Twitter, and those who represent them.

There’s Terence Eden (@edent) for Vodafone, a multitude of feeds for O2, including the official Litmus stream (@O2_litmus) and one for the company itself (@o2ukofficial).  It’s obvious that the tech companies were one of the first groups to wise-up to the power of Twitter, with some fantastic best practice shown by Sage.

There are many key players already involved; including Mike Morper (@morps), Senior Director for MAS Product Management and David Van Toor (@dave_vt), who  oversees CRM and channel activity. Plus, Sage has created a number of ‘official’ streams like the Sage MAS Summit feed (@tellmasteam). Dassualt Systemes (@3dperspectives) is flying the flag for the French, with Capgemini (@capgemini) joining the crowd.

An area I wouldn’t have automatically assumed would be quite as savvy is the Travel industry, but I’m happy to say that these guys are also up to speed. Notably, this includes Lastminute.com (@lastminute_com), British Airways (@britishairways) and falling loosely into this bracket – TomTom navigation (@tomtom_).

The Mashable piece looked at a mixture of ‘official’ feeds, and companies that were lucky enough to have a real person liaising with the Twitter community. But I wondered what the process of choosing these brands were, was it based on another list? Was it personal choice, or those most visible within the author’s network?

Many say that a lot of European brands aren’t aware, or are fans of Twitter. But is that strictly true? At first, I chose to look at an independently created list – and see how many of them are actually represented on Twitter. I’m a fan of the BrandZ lists, which are created by Millward Brown Optimor, in conjunction with The Financial Times and Datamonitor. Unlike other studies, the BrandZ Top 100 Most Powerful Brands fuses consumer measures of brand equity with financial measures to place a financial value on brands.

I pulled out the Top 20 European companies, and did a little digging. It turns out that although not all of the companies had presence on Twitter, some were flying the flag:

- Nokia. There are numerous; @nokconv is the official stream from the Nokia Conversations blog, @womworldnokia is a Nokia sponsored resource providing latest news, comment and feedback on all things about Nokia from the world of social media. Plus, there are plenty of unofficial employees blogging too.

- Vodafone. Terence Eden (@edent) as mentioned above, plus many other members of the team providing personal insights. Dan Applequist (@torgo) covers mobile web and Internet, and Jakub Hrabovsky (@jakubH) & Dan Bowsher (@dan_bowsher) represent the media relations team. There are also the official tweets from @vodafone_news.

- BMW. I doubt that @BMWConceptX1 is affiliated with BMW, but Scott Gray (@thescott) most definitely covers all things social for BMW South Africa. Even though it’s a European company, I can’t find anyone ‘over here’ as such.

- Tesco. One of the first British retailers to start using the service, the Tesco-owned US chain Fresh & Easy is using Twitter to interact with customers and post special offers/store openings. I’m surprised this hasn’t been reflected in the UK, but the site is obviously being used to test the water. There seems to be some confusion as to which profile is ‘the real deal’ though, as some reports direct you to @fresh_and_easy, and others to @freshneasybuzz.

- SAP. @sapnetwork seems to be only be used to promote blog posts from within the SAP blog network. They could benefit from engaging in a little conversation, ING (@inggroup) is much the same – as is @siemensplm.

What I thought was most interesting though, is that the larger players rated by ‘influence’ are not embracing this medium so avidly. This doesn’t just apply to the Millward Brown list, but just by looking at those getting involved vs. those who dismiss this channel as invaluable. It’s probably most telling though that the brands which appear to be growing in these terms (influence and ‘brand equity’), most certainly are.

My point here is that there are a host of European companies getting involved with Twitter as outlined on a small scale above, and that larger players should take a page out the books of those that have embraced it successfully. It may still only be the UK’s 291st visited site (as of week ending 21/01/09), but those who take the time to Tweet are extraordinarily vocal – and I’ve learnt that complaints made on this network tend to be repeated, mirrored and re-posted elsewhere. Brands take note.