The question that people seem to be most often asking each other is, What are you doing? What are you doing in LEDs? What are you doing with your fabs? What are you doing to thwart the economy’s impact on your business? What are you doing at EDN that my company can be a part of? That constantly posed question begs for information sharing. And, as part of EDN’s ever-striving effort to keep the electronics industry informed and ask as well as answer the question, we’ve joined Twitter, www.twitter.com/ednmagazine, the now-famous social-media tool that allows you to send short, microblog “tweets” to associates, or “followers.”

EDN first checked out Twitter in early 2008 but put the fledgling tool on the back burner and instead focused our online efforts on our popular blogs, newsletters, RSS (really simple-syndication) feeds, and Web site as means to keep the electronics industry informed in real time. As with the in-depth coverage in EDN magazine, our engineering and executive audiences responded to, trusted, and respected these proven mediums. When we spoke with readers at the time, they brushed off Twitter as a flavor-of-the-moment site that spread mundane blips of life among its users, who seemingly had endless amounts of free time.

Now, a year later, Twitter has changed. It’s grown up, in both its content and its audience. The tool gets approximately 10 million visitors a month, and the makeup of the audience driving that traffic may be a surprise. According to comScore Inc, it’s not the early-20s, social-media early adopters pushing this site’s growth. The Internet-marketing-research company reports that 45- to 54-year-olds, followed by 25- to 34-year-olds are the most likely groups to visit Twitter. So, it should come as no surprise that the tweets people have begun to post on the site have begun to match the maturity of the audience. Fewer posts are about the mundane blips of life, such as getting coffee or watching Heroes. More leaders and businesses are joining the site each day, contributing to the flock of companies that includes semiconductor-industry chiefs Analog Devices, Digi-Key, Fairchild, and Texas Instruments.

Twitter is far from perfect; anyone familiar with the “fail-whale” image will tell you that fact. The 140-character limit also poses a challenge. And, yes, many users do still post mindless chatter. But don’t write off this tool as a preteen sensation that will be over faster than the next boy band. Like every other online medium, it’s about aligning with the right partners. Do so, and you’ll find that there’s real value here in making connections, delivering information, and staying informed.

With www.twitter.com/ednmagazine, we’ll give you instantaneous news updates, technical analysis, and quick tweets on our blogs, editors, and opportunities faster than you can get with EDN’s newsletters and RSS feeds. You’ll still want these tools as well as our print magazine for the full industry picture, mind you, but it never hurts to have information readily at hand in this rapidly changing, fast-paced world in which we design, partner, and compete.

And here’s our promise to you: We won’t waste your time with insignificant blurbs or overload you with 50 tweets a day about every little thing going on in the EDN universe. We understand that you have better things to do. We’ll hold our Twitter messages to the same high standards to which we hold all of our editorial products.

So far, EDN’s readers have embraced our leverage of Twitter. In fact, within 24 hours of promoting EDN’s Twitter activity, nearly 100 followers with bios ranging from engineers, to chief executive officers, to marketing execs, to professors and students, had signed up to receive our tweets, many of them taking the time to e-mail and tell us what they thought of the move.

Follow us at www.twitter.com/ednmagazine and find out what your peers and rivals are doing. And drop us a line. We’d like to know what you think and what you are doing.

Contact me at sdeffree@reedbusiness.com.