The following post is by guest author Rich Charbonneau (@richcharbonneau), a clinical project manager who works for a pharmaceutical company in the U.S.

I’ve been using Twitter for a few months now and have been truly amazed by the potential of the medium.  There are literally millions of bits of information to be had in the Twittersphere.  Of course, some of these bits of information are more valuable than others.  Therein lies the biggest problem I’ve seen so far with Twitter: how does one effectively sift the “wheat from the chaff?”

As I began to seek Twitter authors to follow that were relevant to my interests, I found myself subscribing and then unsubscribing from writers many times over.  After performing numerous iterations of this process, I began to distill where the “best” (in my opinion) information could be had.  Patterns began to emerge in terms of who the people were that were tweeting the best information and who, in turn, their connections were.

Twitter is not a community, but it’s an ecology in which communities can emerge. -Howard Rheingold

It seems to me that this knowledge about who the best tweeters are in particular areas of interest could be of great value. Certainly, if for no other reason, the time alone saved from not having to sift on one’s own could represent significant value. Yet, how does one access this type of knowledge?

There are Twitter directories out there such as WeFollow, but the problem with these is that they are based solely on the aggregate number of followers authors have.  The more followers you have, the higher your rank.  Unfortunately, the number of followers a twitterer has is not necessarily related to the quality of that twitterer’s posts (consider Ashton Kutcher!)

There are also directories created by individuals by topic.  However, in my experience such directories can often be populated with friends of the creator and can also be somewhat exclusive.

Are there better solutions out there?  What has your experience been?

Great advice for all budding journalists/ bloggers/ twitterers:

(1) #100things – Twitter Search

Provocative…

Someone who uses social media successfully doesn’t just create content; her or she creates conversations.

And those conversations create communities.

That’s the real beauty of social media, and while it may or may not be the goal- depending on the site- the result of social media can always be firm connections between the people who participate.

When those connections are formed around businesses, the results can be the sort of brand loyalty and commitment that sales professionals have been dreaming about since the first days of direct marketing.

Read more here.