I'll confess it now. For someone who claims to be well-informed and serious about the digital generation, I have an embarrassingly poor track record on Twitter. It's the 'marmite' member of the web 2.0 family. Some people take to tweeting with furious vigour while others, like me, tend to half-heartedly dabble, leaving days or even weeks between posts like, 'Bought some new shoes! Ace' or 'OMG think I just saw Leona Lewis!!!!' which, let's be honest, are barely broadcastable nuggets of 'information'.

But there's a lot of peer pressure. And for those of us who do lag behind our relentlessly tweeting contemporaries, the sense of competition can start to gnaw away at our self-esteem. For the moment, I haven't considered doing anything about it, but hiring a ghost-tweeter is the sort of last-ditch desperation that I might turn to should the busy tension of the twittersphere gets too great.

For a considerable amount of time now, ghost-tweeters have been managing the virtual identities of many celebrities and prominent public figures. PR monkeys were quick to realise the potential bonus-points that might be extracted from clients by creating 'interaction' with fans without having to rely on busy celebs or VIPs to actually sit down and make the effort to type out a 140-character personal update every now and again (hell, I don't, so why blame them). The problem is that when it was revealed in the New York Times that certain celebrities weren't actually doing the tweeting (such as, shockingly, 50 Cent), there was a bit of an uproar. Jilted fans felt used, nay, betrayed and for a little while the controversy bubbled away online. But it soon passed. In fact, ghost tweeting is bigger than ever and I've had a chat with some of the people who do it. The question now is, will this practice start to spread among members of the general public? Is the pressure of our virtual 'social' lives so great that mono-tweeting failures like myself will start to pay for online identity management? Well, maybe. Lisbeth Tanz, a professional ghost-tweeter, thinks it could happen, but for now usage is spreading primarily among business owners who want to promote their products and services:

"Hiring a ghost tweeter to create the social media presence - and keep it fresh - just makes sense. From what I've seen and heard, hiring someone to run a social media program often occurs after the business owner has tried, unsuccessfully, to launch his or her own program. Launching is less the problem. Keeping it going is the difficulty. I ghost tweet for a local women's newspaper conglomerate because the owners simply don't have the time to do it on their own. However, it is important for the people hiring the ghost tweeters to be involved in the process in some way. Otherwise, they may not fully understand the power of social media and the importance the relationships it creates."

Interestingly, New Zealand CEOs helped lead the way in the world of business ghost-tweeting and the attraction of social media promotion has clearly boomed in lots of industries over the last 12 months. One ghost-tweeter I speak to says they're about to start publishing material under the guise of a boutique hotel, of all things. So how much, then, can we trust on Twitter? I ask Lisbeth how many twitter accounts she thinks might be faked or ghosted. "I'd imagine it's happening more frequently than you might expect" she replies, but adds that she doesn't think this practice will actually harm Twitter in the long run:

"I have no idea how many ghost tweeters there might be, but I don't see any harm with using them if they're doing what Twitter was designed to do - create relationships between people. When I ghost tweet, I tweet in the client's voice, using their words (or words they would use if they were doing their own tweeting)."

We did get in touch with Twitter to ask how many accounts might be ghost-tweeted, or if any of their employees used ghost-tweeters, but they haven't replied.

Signs that this sort of professional activity could spill over into users' social lives are becoming more and more common. Lisa Devaney, another ghost-tweeter, said, "One person I'm dealing with is a business person, but he really wants more exposure on Twitter socially and he wants me to help him out. When you're ghost-tweeting you're looking to capture the personality of a person. I mainly work with human beings - I don't have a lot of clients that you would consider A-list celebrities."

Not, of course, that human beings and celebs are by any means mutually exclusive entities. Being open about ghosting can sometimes charm your fans too, especially if you ask them to be your ghost-tweeters. Even just for a day. This was the ploy of The Decemberists' lead singer and guitarist, Colin Meloy a few months ago. Unless it was actually his ghost-blogger that came up with the idea. I guess we'll never know.

It's an increasingly familiar paradox, isn't it? The more 'in tune' and 'connected' we're meant to be able to be with people, especially complete strangers, the more the worldwide web makes us wonder whether the opposite of that is actually true. (Despite the glowing optimism for humanity which we discussed in our last web-related feature). I suppose it's hard to deny that, for the foreseeable future, the illusion of connectivity will hold an unmistakable allure - both for web-users and anyone who's got something to sell. If you're too cynical to accept that, ugly website Tweet Exorcist tries to 'keep it real' by ousting celebrities who use ghost-tweeters. Their method of protest - opinion polls on how genuine you think someone's tweets are - is a less than scientific approach, but it's enough to prove that a reactionary force exists somewhere.

On the internet, who someone really is has always been a topic of debate. Ghost-tweeting and the spread of twitter-management technologies like this one are just the next logical step; they mark a transition whereby that same identity-ambiguity is now a commercially viable dead space. Social real estate. Scared yet?

An invisible man sleeping in your bed.
Who ya gonna call? Ghost-tweeters!