Marketers in the States by and large assume that when it comes to leveraging the various channels and media open to them, the U.S. is number one, and brands in all other countries are busy playing catch-up. But one channel where Stateside marketers have to play catch-up is Twitter. Based on anecdotal evidence, I’d say the Brits are much more creative in exploiting this particular channel.

Among U.K. brands, it’s not uncommon to run contests in which, to become eligible to win a prize, all a person has to do is retweet the brand’s original tweet about the promotion. Eco-friendly cosmetics brand Lush used to do this fairly regularly. How do I know? Because one of my friends used to retweet the messages.

U.K. apparel etailer Asos, an e-commerce success story if ever there was one, doesn’t limit itself to one Twitter feed. It has a feed dedicated to solving customer service problems, another that provides live service and delivery updates (“Following a road traffic accident on the M60, deliveries are being affected in SK postcodes today”), individual feeds from what seems to be half of its employees, and of course the official feed, where in between tweets about America’s Next Top Model (which it sponsors in the U.K.) and new product shipments, it directs followers to contests on the Asos website and community site.

Perhaps most important, the voice of the official feed is perfect: chatty, enthusiastic, above all engaging (“Morning all! Who’s banished their winter coat to the back of the wardrobe already? We have! x”). Scroll through Asos’s Twitter feed, and you’ll see that most of the posts are responses to other Twitter feeds and retweets mentioning one of the company’s products. Asos gets that Twitter really is a conversation.

(Asos recently began shipping to the States, and word on the street is that a dedicated U.S. website could debut later this year. If I were an apparel merchant here in the States, I’d be following everything that Asos does very closely.)

My personal favorite among the Twitter feeds is that of bookseller Waterstone’s. Bookstores, online and offline, are in the unenviable position of competing against Amazon, whose prices and stock availability can rarely be beat. But thanks in part to its social media efforts, Waterstone’s makes a compelling case for buying from it rather than the more-anonymous behemoth. When the price differential wasn’t huge, I used to plump for Waterstone’s as a way of saying thank-you for its fun tweets.

Currently, to celebrate reaching more than 10,000 followers on Twitter, Waterstone’s is running an ongoing digital treasure hunt. It posts on its Twitter feed hints as to where on its e-commerce site followers will find the “golden ticket” enabling them to claim one of the day’s prizes. What a fabulous way of directing customers and prospects to the site and getting them to poke about and discover the breadth and depth of Waterstone’s offering. Talk about cross-channel pollination!

Waterstone’s also posts about its Twitter feed on its Facebook fan page, which includes a tab dedicated to the feed, as well as a link making it simple for fans to follow it on Twitter—and another link to subscribe to its YouTube channel. All in all, Waterstone’s makes a compelling argument that when it comes to multichannel marketing, more (channels) is more (engagement and loyalty).

The chatter about integrating social media into e-mail and other marketing campaigns has grown even louder recently, due in part to recent announcements by StrongMail and Responsys of new campaign management solutions designed to manage and analyze Facebook and Twitter marketing efforts (see “New Tools and Tips to Strengthen the E-mail and Social Media Bond“). Hopefully these tools will spur companies not only to use social media more efficiently but also more creatively, particularly here in the States. The Brits already have us beat when it comes to the ready availability of cider, Guinness, and fish and chips. Don’t let them best us in use of Twitter too.