Twitter follower count alone is a poor proxy for influence in the real-world.

Social influence has become a numbers game. How many likes, shares, followers, clicks can you collect? It turns out that it doesn't matter how much influence someone has if their message is irrelevant. Influence can provide sway, but relevance can spark action.

It's not just about creation and distribution anymore. We are literally dismantling traditional structures of distribution and, at the same time, building new forms of curated information dissemination.

Klout, a San Francisco-based Internet start-up with Joe Fernandez, CEO and co-founder, has recently integrated five new services for social media users and brands to measure influence and reach across their networks.

Jessica Northey's story is fantastic by any standard: from her humble beginnings on a dirt racetrack in Tucson to being a major player at the highest levels of digital media.

Naturally, a candidate's Twitter influence can only tell part of the story, but it makes sense to us that winning candidates will have more engagement, amplification, and presence in that forum.

Visionaries like Brett Petersel and Courtney Wiley have long argued that social media needs less superstars, and instead, more "superstar thinking." Twitter's Aaron Lee couldn't agree more.