I have found Twitter,and most social media to be flexible enough to change how you use it. Jeff, I have found I simply stop following people, who are serving up a dish I don’t enjoy, but I give them a taste before I do. If over time, their posts are too ” MLM” I am like you and head the other way.

Matt,
I don’t care much about what people had for breakfast, unless they also tell me something interesting about what they are thinking or doing while they eat.

For biz, it helps in 2 ways:
1. It allows an open broadcast of helpful info mixed with announcements of available products and services.
2. It gives biz the ability (via search strings, a la TweetDeck) to easily monitor what is being said in the forum about a company, its personnel, and products/services.

For customers, it obviously gives the ability to comment (pos or neg) about an issue or company. This allows others to “find” and pass along pertinent info.

Personally, I use it more as a biz person than I do for communication with friends and peers. I actually have stopped following lots of folks who merely ramble on about lunches, what they bought their wife for Mothers Day, and their general condition.

Those that follow me get a lot of what I do professionally (present on Adobe related topics) mixed with the occasional personal musing.

Cheese isn’t the answer either. So many marketers and SM ‘experts’ who are trying to sell their SM program now that SM is ‘hot’ have done so to the point of making SM look like MLM – further repulsing the average businessperson or company’s palate for SM engagement.

I was the same kind of mom with the same kind of results!

I experience twitter seems elusive for a lot of smart people. For those of us who tweet, blog, facebook and email it is up to us to keep offering the broccoli – perhaps serve it with some form of cheese!