A recent article in Ad Age presents the social media dilemma expressed by many large, global B2B companies: not knowing what to Tweet about.

The article’s author offered some relatively simple advice -- ‘teach your brand to speak.” And a variety of supplemental comments provided additional pointers about the ways companies can learn how to talk with their customers.

I believe that’s good advice, as far as it goes. But I think it needs to go a lot farther.

To his credit, the author, Noah Brier, notes that crafting 140-character Twitter messages isn’t exactly rocket science. But he mentions only in passing the one issue I believe is critical: that brands and companies are often “the guy at the cocktail party who can't stop talking about himself.”

It’s not surprising to me that B2B marketers and advertising professionals would have trouble seeing the central issue: that brands and corporations have been accustomed to controlling the conversation.

For decades, marketers have taken for granted their ability to dominate the media with their dollars and shout out any message they choose, hoping to drown out the competition. In the 20th century, he who paid the piper called the tune.

What’s most apparent since the advent of the digital age is that brand marketers no longer control the conversation. It’s no longer enough to say you’re a thought leader, for instance. Now you have to prove it. And live it.

The digital age ushered in that change by enabling two-way communications. And now, social media have taken that capability and put it on steroids.

In the mind of an ex-journalist like me, Twitter is little more than a news feed. Unfortunately, that news feed is getting more and more cluttered, as companies belt out the obligatory 12 to 15 tweets every day. That feels a lot like the “shouting louder” approach of the broadcast era.

It certainly contributes to the glut of information. And what does it say about your brand when you’re filling up my Twitter feed with drivel? Think of it this way: your posts tell me what you think is important. And tell me whether you’re the guy at the party who only wants to talk about himself.

So let’s try something new. Let’s use social media messaging when you actually have something to say. Not something that is only important to you. But something that is important to your readers. Something that they will want to read, or, better yet, will be compelled to read. Perhaps even, something they need to read. And don’t bother them if you don’t have something important to communicate. That’s not to say it needs to be fascinating cocktail party banter, as in the analogy. But that it at least be useful or helpful to your target audience.

And that, once again, takes me back to the early days of my career as a journalist. The skill of sifting through the news tickers and finding the gems was simply called, “news judgment,” knowing what readers want to know, what they need to know. Or, god forbid, even finding and developing the content people want to read. That was, and still is, the essence of being a good journalist.

It seems to me we need brand journalists today. People who understand how a company can be a thought leader in its industry. And lead the discussion in a way its audience needs and respects.

That will be a really tall order if marketing people are still pining for the good old days of one-to-many mass communications and interruption messaging through broadcast media. As the brands that need to be taught how to speak are learning, those days are long gone.