In reading two conflicting opinions about the value of Twitter, I’d like to add a few words to the argument.  In last Sunday’s New York Times, David Carr’s piece Why Twitter Will Endure makes a compelling point that Twitter is now part of the internet’s piping; the 140 character update is a standard, much like html.

Today, Techmeme picked up Anil Dash’s blog post Nobody Has A Million Twitter Followers.  I think Anil is accurate in his assessment that 1,000,000 followers does not imply listeners.  However, Anil mentions metrics like response rates / click-throughs to tweets as being measured by calculating the clicks as percent of following (eg. a commenter, David Griner, notes that a recent Ashton Kutcher tweet to his link only  got a .14% response rate).

Number of followers should not be the denominator of response rate, nor does this logic make sense in understanding Twitter’s value.   In Griner’s case, where else would he have been able to get 6000 incoming interested visitors for free?  What is the value of these socially-culled visitors?  Did they tell their friends?  What was the quality of the referral?

Influence marketing metrics should perhaps be the more operative measurement for Twitter — its value is far beyond the narrow-minded reach of views, clicks and purchases of CPA and CPC.  Fred Wilson blogged this week about affiliate programs undervaluing links of  blog referrals.

Let’s combine some Malcolm Gladwell thinking and overlay that on Twitter.  When The Tipping Point was published, there was no Twitter or Facebook.  Gladwell uses the term Connectors as being the spreaders of influence.  He defines Connectors as people that have ~400 connections.   Before Twitter and Facebook, both on the ground and on the net, guerrilla marketers attempted to use influence marketing psychology to start word-of-mouth product trends.

Since Downtown NYC is considered a hub of early-adopter trendsetters and Connectors, it’s littered with billboards, stickers, walking ads all attempting to catalyze this phenomenon.  Daily Candy appeared shortly after The Tipping Point became popular.  Their newsletters were credited with tapping into the Connector and influencer segments of women’s fashion, and, at one time, was believed to have an accelerated impact on the spread of fashion trends.  It was later bought by Comcast for $125m.

Now, let’s ponder Twitter’s value influentially.  Picking a few familiar names - Anil Dash or Clay Shirky or Jack Dorsey - individuals that Gladwell would call both Mavens (people the public looks to for influence) and also Connectors.  Prior to Twitter, any of these guys could have reached theoretically 400 friends or so with a piece of information that they wanted to share.  But it’s difficult to imagine they could have emailed or spread something influential on multiple topics a day.  Not possible.  Now, most of these people are at a minimum followed by tens of thousands of other influential people.  You don’t have to be a mathematician to know that 400 times x is less than 20,000 times x.

So that’s where I basically disagree with Anil’s premise of seeing a gap in Twitter’s value due to bloated follower numbers.  It doesn’t matter whether their “organic” following is 25,000 or 2,000,000, because much of their important following (Gladwell uses the 80/20 rule, but my guess is it’s even more polarized) is a very small but very valuable number.

And best not to measure Twitter via silos of followers either.  The much more interesting vector is to look at the track results for bits of information, as opposed to people.  Twitter will now be a key decider of “social epidemics” - Apple Tablets, Google phones - responses within Twitter will now reach consumers before TV commercials, salesmen, and, in particular, before they click through an internet ad.  Even more powerful, many will be reached and influenced before they do a Google search, having already gone through the process of being influenced and deciding to buy or to act within the walls of Twitter and Facebook.  Sure, Google should still get plenty of the residual traffic and revenues for the purchase step, which traditionally has been a keyword search.  Yet, at the same time, Twitter will likely direct things first.  As Twitter and Facebook deepen their roots and continue to build not just superficial visits, but consistent hour-to-hour constant usage, more and more searchers may have already made their decision, registered, transacted, what have you, before many users decide they would want to initiate a search.

Information market value trumps individual people.  It doesn’t matter how powerful one person is, even the slightest echo chamber has more value.  Here’s an exercise:  Imagine a story that relates to Obama that you heard recently, and what you thought about it.  Ask yourself the question: Was it the statement that influenced you? or  Was it the echo chamber where you heard it that was the actual point of resonance?

Trends more efficiently organize in a petri dish of influential tweeters, bloggers, retweets, Facebook “like”s, Tumblr mentions, blog comments, etc.  Twitter is like a combo NYSE-NASDAQ for information; it is the hub.

Another possible fallacy in evaluating Twitter is looking at its economic contribution purely on advertising measurement results.  I know of no advertising medium anywhere built on anything other than content.  Twitter needs to be an editorial and social content vehicle first; without this, an advertising harvest would be impossible.   Google knows this well - often having to tweak its ranking formulations to weed out SEO and elevate true informational content.

So my suggestion is to hold off focusing on followers, click-throughs, and the usual visible metrics.  This is unlikely to be where the ultimate power game for Twitter is being played.  The game of influence is more obfuscated, less concrete, abstract to measure, yet much more powerful.   Metaphorically, the combination of the loyal user adoptions of Twitter and Facebook with the penetration of blogging and the downfall of print news are creating the first serious challenge to browser-based search as a means of mass influence.