Those of you who teach, know what a pleasure it is to be blessed with bright students. And some will know the special blessing of teaching bright adult students.

A year ago, I was teaching my class at Columbia and I had just finished a section on the role of research in developing a marketing strategy. One student said,

I think I understand. This kind of research requires you to have great listening skills. You need to put aside your own perspective and really listen to what people have to say. To be honest with you, I’m not sure I’m that good a listener. I don’t know if I could do that.

What a wonderful, honest insight. It is true: one of the things that marketing people need to have is the ability to get outside the bubble and deeply and genuinely listen to what people have to say. Those working in an organization, such as this student who worked at a private school, are not always so good at being dispassionate listeners because they have their own agendas.

I am a listener. People’s perspectives fascinate me. That’s why I love moderating focus groups. Every time I finish one I am totally fired up, especially if the conversation has been lively and stimulating.  I like to explore people’s values and I am also fascinated by the way different people frame their ideas linguistically.

Now there is a new medium that brings listening to a whole new level: that is Twitter. One of Twitter’s enormous boons to anyone interested in social attitudes is that you can listen to conversations among social networks without intruding enough to alter their form or style. There is no question that certain groups use Twitter more than others, and so your ability to listen in, for example, to conversations among mid-50ish white doctors in the U.S. is not as great as your ability to listen to a conversation among Brazilian teenagers. But Twitter is growing by leaps and bounds and everyday new groups come on board.

Here are some examples of people I have had the pleasure of following on  Twitter:

• A young, urban African-American male with one out-of-wedlock kid and no job who gets high first thing every morning and stays high the remainder of the day and night while he mostly drives around town
• A mid-20s, working-class urban nurse’s assistant who is going to school and worries endlessly about boyfriends
• A self-styled 16-year-old female geek at a public high school in Iowa
• A dynamic, mid-thirties curator at a large museum who develops cultural exhibitions about Native American culture in the Southwest

I know that some of you are rolling your eyes: why would someone want to be anywhere close to some of these people? But my feeling is that it never hurts to listen. The people I described all have value systems, priorities, and life goals. All express themselves fairly unreservedly in their own language on Twitter. Some are among the hardest to reach via traditional market research tools, yet we seek to reach all of them with various marketing messages. Twitter provides a brilliant tool for understanding their mindsets as we try to connect with them.