Wal-Mart’s sustainability efforts have been well-chronicled on this blog during the past several years.

The world’s largest retailer has set forth ambitious goals to reduce its carbon footprint and to make its stores and products more energy efficient and environmentally-friendly.

Now word comes that Wal-Mart is hosting a sustainability summit in Brazil starting today as it expands its message to South America.  What’s particularly interesting is how Wal-Mart launched and is driving attendance at the meeting, which is set to focus on issues surrounding deforestation, supply chain and packaging initiatives.

As is noted by Tweeter and Morning News reporter Lana Flowers, Wal-Mart launched news of this summit through Twitter.  To date, it has over 1,000 participants committed to attend.

There will be both English and Portuguese “tweets” at the conference.  “Tweets” is the phrase for sending a message through a Twitter account.

Interesting use of social media by a large corporation and just a sign of the times of how communication channels are changing.  Click here to read more.  And click here to access Wal-Mart’s Twitter homepage, which has a number of Twitter accounts for different levels of consumer and corporate interaction.  You can follow Talk Business on Twitter, too, at this link.