Eager to cut through the hype engulfing Twittwe, some Tefal heads at Harvard Business School have done somerather clever  research into how the microblogging tool is actually used.

First of all, despite what you may have heard, it turns out that Twitter is not the most important invention since fire and, surprisingly, will not bring about universal happiness and peace among all the peoples of the Earth.

Sounds pretty damning, doesn’t it? But it depends what you are expecting from Twitter. As a two-way mass communication tool it fails but, in marketing and content-distribution terms, Twitter is incredibly valuable.

It’s huge: visitors to twitter.com grew 1,200% from Feb 2008 to Feb 2009 and Twitter has become the third largest social networking site in the US. Where Twitter excels is in narrowcasting relevant information to users who have expressed an interest in your content.

It’s not a mass communication tool but a way of connecting to specific interest groups.  And targeted content is the Holy Grail of online communication.

DON’T

This plea for sanity is born out of the vast amount of Tweet spam that infects the microblogging tool.  If you haven’t encountered this, create an account and wait for the flood of “followers” who offer you tips on alleged marketing or – on a less sophisticated level – links to NSFW images.

Adding to the background noise by setting up a corporate Twitter feed won’t help. The way to use Twitter – and any social media – to spread a message is to target your audience, identify exisitng networks of interest make sure that your message is relevant to them.