New research conducted by the Social Media Usability Group shows that 83% of publishing professionals, given a straight choice between Twitter and their partners, would choose Twitter. One enthusiastic editor confirmed the sentiment 'Twitter is like the good old days of publishing; great fun and no one really knows what's going on' and goes on to say 'my wife tweeted to me that she'd like to talk IRL, TBH I thought WTF....it's caused quite a #rift'. 

The research went on to say that, of all of the industries they had researched, publishing execs were the most likely to tweet whilst drunk. Crispin Gohte, MD of Social Media Usability Group (or SMUG), added 'this speaks for itself, we also noticed an increase in professionals checking into hotels on FourSquare during major book fairs. Come to your own conclusions.'

FutureBook delved deeper into the trade's use of Twitter and a dark side emerged to this social media phenomenon. We discovered a former publisher who became so dependent on Twitter that he had to leave the book trade. He described  Twitter as 'social media crack', and said, 'I got really paranoid and felt like people were following me'. He has gone on to get, what he calls a 'real job.....where people ask your name before they ask if you are on Twitter.'

On the upside, during the extensive research SMUG did find one publisher who could actually prove they had sold a book directly from Twitter. FutureBook predicts that this will develop into a very insignificant revenue stream for publishers. 

SMUG's research is interesting on a few levels and teaches key lessons, the main one being that we don't need industry research to teach us The Bleeding Obvious, or as I like to call it #TBO. Feel free to use my hashtag and get it trending. These things are important tweeps. Oh, and Happy April Fools' Day ;-)