It’s a good time to be a Bruce Springsteen fan. New album. Super Bowl halftime show a week from today. Tour dates starting to be announced. Another Rolling Stone cover story.

That cover story includes this quote from Springsteen: “I’m not interested in the solipsistic approach to songwriting. I don’t want to tell you all about me. I want to tell you about you.”

I like that quote a lot. It speaks to a big part of why Springsteen endures long after so many of the self-absorbed rock stars who populated the charts with him in the ’80s have faded into the “Where are they now?” category. His songs aren’t about himself, they’re about all of us. Like much great art, the best of them are open to multiple complex interpretations.

That quote reflects a philosophy that works well in business generally and marketing communications in particular. Or should, anyway. Sadly, too many companies ignore that philosophy.

When you visit a company’s Web site, do you want to know about the company, or do you want to know about what the company is going to do for you?

When you’re developing your marketing communications, are you focusing on what the company wants to say, or what the customer (and potential customer) wants to know?

They may seem like subtle distinctions, but they’re not. Understanding them is, I believe, a crucial ingredient to success today.

Takeaway for marketers: Reject corporate solipsism. Focus like a laser on the customer.

SNF. Social Networking Fatigue.

You wake up in the morning and just have to check your Twitter stream, (never pausing to consider if it’s worth refining the obvious prostate joke there). Then it’s on to Facebook. That photo your daughter posted needs a comment, and that comment your co-worker made needs a follow up comment, and look at that: Someone posted an article that’s worth reading, and — WAIT! I need to check my LinkedIn account to see whether anyone posted an actual discussion under the Discussions tab of my groups, or responded to any of my own discussion threads, and I also have to check the groups I created to see if there are any new member requests pending and oh, I forgot, I need to check the Jobs tab to see if there are any potential new clients in there, which reminds me that I ought to take a second to update my MySpace profile photo (it’s gotta match my Facebook profile pic), then hop on over to Squidoo and update a few of my lenses, then it’s on to AdGabber to see what’s been posted in the world of advertising news and discussion and, oh, I can’t forget My Yahoo! to see if any of the groups I belong to have anything new and interesting and hold on, let me check my iGoogle too and there’s a pretty good blog post I think deserves tweeting and …

Crap, is it noon already? My personal economy’s tanking — I gotta get some work done. Not to mention I haven’t even checked my FriendFeed account or uploaded last weekend’s party pix to Flickr yet.

It all leads to SNF: a result of the imperative that burns deep within the inner geek, the info-sponge instinct that drives us to be plugged in to all things all the time. It can be exhausting … and it can be a (sometimes fascinating) detraction from the job at hand.

And (so far) there’s no little blue pill to address it.

Takeaway for marketers: If you’re getting involved in the social networking scene, you have to add value … because this is the sort of mindset into which you’re planning to insinuate yourself.

Maybe you haven’t delved into the world of Twitter yet. I’ve been there with an alter ego for over a year, and just recently began Twittering @LOHADdotcom.

The signal-to-noise ratio on Twitter can be frustrating — which is the main reason, I think, there are so many dodos on Twitter.

Here are some actual recent tweets culled from Twitter’s public timeline over the course of about a half-hour. I’ve removed the name of the Twitterer; I don’t want to be perceived as insulting anyone. Alternatively, you can go to Twitter right now and look at the public feed to find dozens (hundreds! thousands!) more tweets like these:

I can’t fall asleep.

Heading to the apple farm in SLO

I think I should curl up in bed and go to sleep.

Chloe Sevigny is such a fascinating creature.

Googling now

well my good mood is slowly starting to fade away.

Could thursday hurry up and get here?

Cleaning the bedroom

Battery’s dying. I’ll turn my phone back on tomorrow

Finally getting around to cooking dinner – just a little bit late. Tonight it’ll be ratatouille!

the snow has forced me to officially abort all plans of socializing tonite

The kids are down… now Heidi and I are going to try to plan out next week.

well, off to work midnight shift. be home after 8am

Just burnt the majority of the posters that one hung on my walls

I jumped out of a plane on the weekend and landed on my coccyx. Now it hurts to sit down.

Seriously. No editing. I didn’t make any of those up.

When one is faced with a flood of words that make Larry King’s old USA Today column seem like insightful criticism from Pauline Kael or Noam Chomsky, it’s no wonder the dodos flee Twitter en masse. Even a dodo isn’t that much of a dodo.

There are plenty of reasons for this mess of nothing, this wisdom internal monologue of the crowd that flows endlessly through the Twitter timeline, not the least of which is what I like to call “the glorification of the mundane.”

There’s a significant percentage of the population that thinks everything they do is endlessly fascinating to everyone. Everything they do. Everything. To everyone.

News flash: It’s not.

I think this derives in part from the perception, fueled by reality shows, that the most mundane elements in other people’s lives are endlessly fascinating. Why should anyone other than their husbands care what “The Real Housewives Of Orange County” — or Atlanta — or NYC — are up to?

So people think, “Well, if that can be a TV show, the mundane details of my life can be a Web site. Or a blog post. Or a Twitter feed.

But I digress. Back to Twitter — the place where I first heard about the U.S. Air water landing last week, where first-person accounts of the situation in Gaza can be monitored as the bombs fall, where breaking news breaks long before it breaks on the news.

There could be lots more of this good stuff, except far too many people simply aren’t paying attention to these “7 Ways to Be Worth Following on Twitter.”

More signal, less noise. That’s what makes someone on Twitter worth following … and, in aggregate, makes Twitter itself something far more worthwhile than it appears to many on first (and second and even third) impression.

Maybe “What are you doing?” on top of the Twitter page should change. Too many people take it too literally. Something along the lines of, “Say something worth reading” might be better.

Because no one really cares about every random thought that pops into your head. Unless, of course, you’re Larry King.

Takeaway for marketers: Signal-to-noise ratio matters not only on Twitter, but also on on your Web site, in your email communications, in your advertisements … and so on … and so on …

This article over on MarketingProfs ought to get you thinking. And wondering. And worrying. And thinking some more. A taste:

“Recent trends in technology and culture have created, my friend Alan observes, an ’empowered’ environment where everyone expects to pay nothing or close to it for the ideas that fuel marketing and advertising.”

In an environment where there seem to be infinite ideas available to fuel marketing and advertising, it’s not the generating of ideas that carries the most value, but the understanding of which ideas are most appropriate for the task at hand.

To use a publishing analogy: A magazine editor might view hundreds of manuscripts from writers, but only a few articles make it into the issue. There are real reasons why they do and don’t.

Takeaway for marketers: How are your editorial instincts?

That may sound counter intuitive, but it’s step 1 of Darren Hardy’s 12-step program “for changing those behaviors that block our creative juices and stifle our potential.” A good read — and I’m looking forward to the other 11 steps.

Takeaway for marketers: What three things can you stop doing in 2009 to make yourself more productive?