But if you look at time investment to payback, is that [Twitter] the right place to spend that time - would it be better to read a particular set of blogs or a single blog where the analyst culled out the important issues. How do we determine the investments that best meet the goals of the strategy. Or, in the knowledge economy, is the real metric the network, and its breadth and depth without worrying about the results - but knowing that a network will bring results, and even that it will bring results when needed - and that it may drive innovation spontaneously.  Therefore the entire equation changes from understanding the output to measuring the capability of the network.

This needs picking apart because it is at the heart of how ICAEW members are going to be operating in the (near) future.

Dan's first point about time and payback is crucially important because there is an inherent assumption that time has a value that can be adequately compared across alternatives. It doesn't unless you believe in the Marxist theory of labour value. This is neither a flippant nor deliberately argumentative point. Think about it. Running a Google search for a specific topic might yield an immediate result or no result. The time taken to raise any search query is virtually identical but results can be VERY different. It is therefore patently obvious that time in this context doesn't matter.

Second, Dan is assuming that it is necessary to be following everything that happens in the flow of information via services like Twitter. The answer is a resounding NO. Twitter has been described as something that has the flavour of ambient intimacy. It is a river where you can dip in and out as the occasion demands. BUT - as some writers have discovered, Twitter has many business purposes.

Dan then turns to the discovery of real value, asking whether it is the network that delivers the value we are seeing in these new technologies. The answer is a resounding YES.

Laura Fitton has written extensively about this based on her own experiences. When I was in Boston earlier in the month we met and were looking for restaurant recommendations. She Tweeted her 5,300 person network and within a minute, four recommendations came back. Voila! This may sound like a trivial example but I see it repeated over and over every day. Everything from "How do I answer this issue?" to "Help, I'm in trouble!" turn up and within minutes, people receive useful responses, often in the 'direct message' channel cof their respective networks.

In this context, belonging to the right networks collapses the time to solution by an order of magnitude compared to that which might be available in small networks.

Seen in that light, Dan's question snuffs out the notion that you can simply follow a small handful of 'experts' who cull 'stuff' for you. That might have been true three years ago when there were far fewer bloggers but not today. In some niches it is true to say there are very few reliable sources but if I think about US tax for instance, there is a Tax Almanac run on a wiki which I have described as an exercise in 'crowd sourcing' and a welter of tax lawyers and practitioners from whom I can cull information. But I still have to hunt them down.

Early next month I will be in Las Vegas demonstrating a service called ESME. It is a way of mixing the flow of conversations and information of the kind you find in Twitter with business processes. I cannot reveal too much about the scenario but you can think about it in these terms: How do you find the 'go-to guy/gal' when a problem arises? Unless you know from your immediate peers, it is pretty darned difficult. Using inter-connected networks made up of affinity groups, that problem evaporates.

The question then comes, how best to both develop and leverage the network. It is clear no-one will join a network let alone participate unless they see business value in it for them. By developing business use cases of the kind I am describing, we hope to demonstrate that ESME provides one approach that has value because of the network.

Now comes the crunch question. If the network is where value lives what does that say for proprietary information contained in the many networks that professionals dip into? How for example can you know that the information you are seeing is the best you'll find? If those same networks are open, does that improve the chances of discovering exactly what you need? I say yes. That's one reason why ESME has been a huge hit inside the SAP community, and that's before anyone sees the real deal. It has nothing to do with expectations being raised but about the implicit promise that network effects can deliver back to the individual.

I have one caveat to this general line of thinking. The value of the network is not simply a question of size. It has a qualitative flavour as demonstrated by the quality of answers one receives. A large network affords the opportunity to discover things and people of which you were not previously aware. But if your immediate network comprises people that have no relevance to your topic area, then that network is useless. That's why I don't follow all those who follow me on Twitter. I follow roughly half the number.

We still don't have adequate measures that deal with the quantum of Dan's question. I'm not sure that matters. I am much more impressed by the qualitative nature of network responses. Those, unfortunately don't fit ROI models so well. The good news is they are readily demonstrated.

I suspect it won't be long before ICAEW members start asking what this means for them. I have a simple answer - dip in and find out. The water's a lot warmer than you think. But, if you want to get serious about this kind of thing then there's a lot of learning to be done.

As a footnote, the ESME video has been watched over 2,250 times in the last 3 months. We did almost no promotion apart from a couple of blog posts but they were inside two very large networks. What does that say about network effects?