The twittersphere, blogosphere, and my email have been flooded with people buzzing about the recent article, Twitter hype punctured by study, on the BBC News Technology page.  Everyone knows how passionate I am about Social Media and I, for one, think this study is just what we all needed.

A couple of the key takeaways from the study were the conclusions that Twitter is not a Social Networking tool  and is, instead, a broadcasting vehicle – shocking!!! (not really)  I never viewed Twitter as a Social Network; instead it has always been a channel to broadcast a message.  The entire concept of “What are you doing?” reinforces that point.  Unfortunately, many of the responding messages focused on inane, almost minute-by-minute, updates of narcissistic individuals – this has really given Twitter a bad name.  NOTE:  Just because a website asks you what you are doing, doesn’t mean you have to answer…constantly.

Twitter can be effectively used to share content with people that want to know about it.  Furthermore, leveraging Twitter as a listening post is probably the most compelling use of all.  Tools such as Tweetbeep.com are really great at helping you get some real value out of Twitter by delivering gems of information to you based on keyword alerts and by filtering out the nonsense.

The Twitter following is huge.  Organizations (and current Presidents) have used Twitter properly and with great success.  With the release of this study, my hope is that people get creative about using Twitter to share valuable, relevant content with groups of people that are listening.  As always, there is a right way and then other ways to use Social Media and this study can help us focus on finding better approaches.

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