$2.50 per month is what Phone Dog think a Twitter follower is worth in their lawsuit against a former employee.
As nebulous and ambiguous as Phone Dog’s claim seems to be it appears some price is being created on the business value of social media users.
To date we’ve seen services like Empire Avenue, Klout and Kred try to measure social media users’ real influence on the different web platforms which in turn allows businesses to allocate some sort of value.
As social media and the web mature, we’ll see businesses spend more time understand where the value lies online.
Each platform is going to have a different value to a business. Depending on the market, one person may be worth more on Twitter than on Facebook and similarly a business may put more value on members of a specific LinkedIn group or industry forum.
What we shouldn’t confuse “value” with is how the services themselves make money. For Facebook, the value comes from the marketing opportunities presented by people sharing their lives while for LinkedIn it’s largely coming from employment related advertising and search.
Other social media platforms are finding other ways to make money and each will have a different attraction to users, businesses and advertisers. All of which will affect their perceived value.
That perceived value is the most important part of social media. If users don’t think a site adds something to their lives, then that service has no value to anyone.
It’s tempting to think that people will object to having a “value” placed on their heads as users, but most folk understand the commercial TV and radio that does pretty much the same thing.
The real question of how much people are prepared to share online will come when they understand the value of the data they are giving the social media platforms. When users start to understand this, they may ask for more service from these companies.
What a Twitter user is worth right now is probably different to what they will be worth this time next year, but there’s no doubt we’ll all have a better idea.