I search constantly on the web for writers and thinkers who display a chip on their shoulder. They are brilliant thinkers but they have a sarcasm about them that keeps my days interesting. One of my favorite writer is Alexander van Elsas. There are times when I completely agree with Alexander and also times when I completely disagree… there really is not a middle ground.

He has a post talking about the real value of Twitter ‘s suggest user feature which was made a little more valuable after Jason Calacanis offered $500K. Congratulation Jason and Alexander, you have pushed me to a crossroad on the purpose of quality over quantity.

We talked about the purpose of quality over quantity all the time on the web.

“I would rather have 200 devout followers than 20,000 kind-of listeners.”

There is a reason we do this. We are the social-renegades of the marketing world. What? You think we should send out mass mailings? Buy an email list? AHH. I am dying from heart failure.

The truth of the matter is this… I haven’t come to any conclusions yet on the value of quality over quantity. Jason Calacanis shows the absolute value of driving traffic from Twitter to his start-up, Mahalo. He was willing to pony up $250,000 to drive two-million visits a month to his site. I would do it too.

And yet, Alexander talks about the quality of the followers being below zero. I also agree with him when he says:

“It makes the reach you have on Twitter as good as any spammer that hijacked millions of e-mail addresses. There is always a sucker that falls for it. The real-time effect is pretty much worthless when put into comparison to the nr of followers and the spam being produced. To me the only benefit, if you can call it a benefit, would be that the audience that follows you remains persistent.”

So what is the answer? You can always give the quality over quantity speech but does that drive revenue? In the world of business there is absolute value to use social media but what is the strategy? Quality over Quantity?

What are 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 Twitter followers worth to you?

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