In the latest issue of DRIVEN, “Coolhunting 2.0” looks at a philosophical shift in the research performed by marketing departments — specifically, when it comes to sources. No longer is everyone scrambling to tap hyper-influential tweens to find out what’s “cool”; now there’s a growing movement towards tapping the average Joe to find out what’s a “trend”. It turns out there’s some actual empirical evidence that not all technological innovations are propagated by youth — that Twitter, one of the fastest growing and most influential communication tools on the net, actually owes its success to the post-college crowd.This New York Times article points out that Twitter was actually adopted out-of-the gate by professionals as a communication and networking tool — that the one-to-many distribution model (in other words, the open “broadcast to anyone who cares to subscribe” model) is perfectly suited for just that type of communication. It may simply be a sign that corporate PR departments are more savvy to the web, but it definitely didn’t take companies as much convincing to get on Twitter as it did to get on the corporate blogging bandwagon, for example.

But the best part is that teens just don’t “get it”. From the article:

Wendy Grazier, a mother in Arkansas, said her two teenaged daughters thought Twitter was “lame,” yet they asked her to follow teenage pop stars like Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift on Twitter so she could report back on what the celebrities wrote. Why won’t they deign to do it themselves? “It seems more, like, professional, and not something that a teenager would do,” said 16-year-old Miranda Grazier. “I think I might join when I’m older.”