I feel one big thing that the "cool" (as opposed to us 'uncool' academics) can miss is that good research is hard. It is common to spend months on topics on areas that don't work out, and years on topics that do. It doesn't fit the modern high-speed of the internet, and it doesn't fit in 140 characters.

And of course, most research isn't particularly interesting to people outside a fairly small area. I might come up with a new way of doing something important in my research area 50 times faster than we did it before, but explaining what I did struggles to fit in 15 pages, never mind 140 characters. Personally I can't imagine what interesting research related-comment you could fit in a tweet. Then again, I've never got twitter (which isn't something I'm proud of -- sufficiently many people are using it that I am sure I'm missing something.. just not sure what).