On the subject of tweeting links to all your headlines, I would argue that there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with doing that — you just shouldn’t make it the focus of your organization’s MAIN Twitter feed. Instead, register @YourOrganization and @YourOrganizationHeadlines, or something along those lines. The main account can be used for delivering breaking news, interacting with the community, seeking information, and so on. The secondary account can just notify people when there’s something new on the Web site — the Twitter version of an RSS feed. Not everyone will want to subscribe to that feed, but not everyone has to.

I follow the Twitter feeds of some Web sites that do tweet every update. I enjoy it because often they’re sites that I otherwise wouldn’t think to visit on a regular basis. For instance, following @OHNewsroom has resulted in me visiting overheardinthenewsroom.com a lot more than I used to.

Obviously it has to be done right — there’s a paper near here, for example, that obviously automates the process, and the result is that occasionally the system will latch onto a cutline instead of something more sensible. As a result, they end up with things like an election results story being tweeted as “JOHN SMITH | THE NEWSPAPER Jane Johnson waits in line to vote with her daughter…” instead of “Johnson wins Anytown City Council election with 55%” or whatever. And that doesn’t do anybody any good. But I can see a headline-tweeting service being valuable to some people.

So, treat Twitter as a broadcast tool for sending out all your headlines if you want to — just don’t make that the only thing you do, and do it from a separate account so people can choose which they prefer.

In the role of Interactive Managing Editor with Barrington Broadcasting/Interactive I am charged with thinking of and developing stratgeies to merge social media with the traditional delivery of online content to our audience. Twitter has been a very touchy area for me. Coming into the broadcasting arena (which I think is shifting to “broadsharing”) from the design thinking space – I can clearly see some of the obsticles that broadcasting identities face when leveraging Twitter. You hit the nail on the head (IMHO). Twitter streams are NOT RSS feeds (which is the easy way out) yet they are a way to get at the ground level with the audience.

I thank you for writing this post and I will be sharing it’s contents with everyone I know! Thanks Brian!

Vincent Hunt