By Steve Safran, Sr. Vice President, Media 2.0 at AR&D

If you want to see a brand new best practice in action, go to twitter.com/FtHoodShootings right now. It is a Twitter feed from the Austin American-Statesman. It's not just that the paper's site, Statesman.com is tweeting about the shootings. It's not even that it is still tweeting about the shootings long after the event. The real reason to examine this is because Statesman has dedicated a separate feed just for the shootings and the aftermath.

The whole "is Twitter news?" debate can end right here. At many news organizations it already has, and I'm more than thankful for that. Twitter is a social breaking news service. It's silly to judge it based upon the tweets that are meaningless to you. Twitter is like YouTube: it's what you do with it that matters. Many newsrooms have now started a Twitter feed, but are using it incorrectly.

So when I saw what Statesman was doing with the feed, I was impressed. This isn't the first time I've seen a news organization grab a Twitter URL and dedicate it to a story, but it's a real shining example of how to do this right.

When there is a breaking story, immediately go to Twitter and grab a URL that works. Statesman's staff had to give it a few tries -- people were already getting Fort Hood Shooting-related URLs.

Poynter's Craig Kanelley talked with Robert Quigley, who is the social media editor at Statesman:

"When we heard (the first news about the shootings), we knew we had to get moving and sent out a breaking news alert," Quigley said in an interview conducted by phone and e-mail. "Within a few minutes, we had a reporter on the phone with Fort Hood and got confirmation. And we turned it around really fast, setting up the Twitter account." Statesman Editor Fred Zipp first proposed the idea of creating a separate Twitter account to cover the event, according to Quigley. Quigley said he liked the idea and immediately jumped on it, trying different name combinations on Twitter, including "FortHood," before deciding on "FtHoodShootings" to fit Twitter's character limit for an account name.

This especially quick thinking has led to a very good, ongoing Twitter stream. Why do this, even if people are subscribing to your "master" Twitter feed? Because they may only be interested in the given story. You'll also draw new subscribers who don't get your main Twitter feed.

Once you've set up the feed, remember that it is a breaking news service. It's fine to link to your stories, but make sure you're doing far more than that. Especially in the early minutes and hours of a breaking story, you want to pump out the information as you get it. We're not Twittering in the service of our brand-extension Web site; we're Twittering to inform the public.

The staff at Statesman is thinking social, and that's how all of us have to behave. Emulating this will improve your reputation as a trusted source of information, and that in turn may mean improved pageviews. But that is not the ultimate goal. You'll see me write this a lot: The goal of being social is to be social.