Too many advisors spoil the tweet.

Just call the above a modern day update to the idiom about cooks and broth. At least that's the take-a-way from a fascinating report on the behind-the-scenes Twitter strategies of presidential candidate Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama during the 2012 presidential election.

In an effort to avoid presidential Twitter gaffes, a staggering 22 Romney staffers reviewed each Romney tweet before posting, according to Daniel Kreiss, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, who published a paper last week (PDF) about Twitter and the 2012 presidential election.

As part of his report, Kreiss spoke to the former Romney staffers who reflected that they felt stymied by layers of bureaucracy required to shoot off even an innocuous 140 character tweet.  

"So whether it was a tweet, Facebook post, blog post, photo—anything you could imagine—it had to be sent around to everyone for approval," Kreiss wrote. "Towards the end of the campaign that was 22 individuals who had to approve it. ... The downfall of that of course is as fast as we are moving it can take a little bit of time to get that approval to happen."

Romney's approach to Twitter was in stark contrast to President Barack Obama's re-election campaign. According to Kreiss, Obama's staff was given greater autonomy to tweet. That freedom allowed staffers to be more successful at reaching voters with timely, more valuable information.

“[Obama] staffers still worked within the contours of the campaign’s messaging. Staffers cite that they were aware of the communications strategy of the campaign, and had an implicit sense of what was 'on' and 'off' message," Kreiss wrote.

The lesson here is a powerful one for any business launching or fine tuning its social-media strategy. While your business may not be looking for votes, it is looking for new customers, to shape public opinion, and deliver real value via snack-sized insights, whether they're tweets, Facebook updates, or blog posts.

The message is clear, a little bit of autonomy can go a long way toward making a social media strategy more responsive and relevant. On the flip side, creating a social media operation that has more scrutinizers than tobacco giant Brown & Williamson has lawyers is a recipe for disaster.

Kreiss wrote: "Romney’s digital director, went so far as to describe the campaign as having 'the best tweets ever written by 17 people … It was the best they all could agree on every single time.'"

An effective social media strategy needs acceptable parameters to operate within, Kreiss argues. And it also needs autonomy to react with changing events that voters (or customers) can benefit from learning more about.