Twitter has always paid attention to its most popular users, as defined by the number of followers who subscribe to their tweets. That number can be a useful metric because it provides some suggestion of the amount of people who might receive a given message. The higher the number, this thinking goes, the more people are likely to receive the message, and the more influential the user who sends the message. With more than 200 Twitter users boasting over 1,000,000 followers according to Twitterholic, the potential reach of Twitter is considerable indeed.

Most of these Twitter Millionaire users are “real world” celebrities or public figures that have existing notoriety supported by more traditional forms of awareness-building in the mainstream press. However given that there are these Twitter users whose audience is so large, how can we observe their influence manifested on a communication network like Twitter? Comedian Conan O’Brien has offered us a glimpse of this virtual influence in action.

A few weeks ago Conan O’Brien joined Twitter after the loss of his late night television program. He’s quickly gathered over half a million followers with his relatively spare tweets (only 11 tweets since 2/24/2010). In addition to publishing few tweets, Conan had not followed any other user on Twitter. Had not, that is, until yesterday when he announced that he was adding a user “at random.”

When I learned of this action, I decided to undergo a brief observation of the growth in that user’s followers as a consequence of Conan’s follow. As Sarah Killen, the user named @LovelyButton that Conan followed, has herself stated she had 3 followers at the time Conan selected her. This article in TechCrunch yesterday afternoon notes that her followers had jumped to 1,300 in the time since Conan followed her. The article includes an update that, in the “few minutes” that transpired between the writing and publishing of the blog post, her followers had doubled to 2,600. By the time that I first took a sample of @LovelyButton’s followers, she had gained 8,755 followers in eight hours. As of the posting of this blog, @LovelyButton’s follower growth has slowed somewhat, but has reached 13,252 in a little more than 24 hours. This figure represents somewhat more than 2% of his total following. Not too shabby for reflected attention!

Apart from adding new followers, @LovelyButton has also generated a lot of conversation online. Beyond the mainstream coverage online in the Los Angeles Times, MTV, EW.com and the Huffington Post – all big deal media hits, btw – Sarah has been the talk of many users on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. I created a search profile in Radian6 to collect a large number of tweets mentioning @LovelyButton, and it has 2,931 mentions (instances of the term ‘@lovelybutton’) to date. On the public Facebook status update search there are also hundreds of mentions of ‘Sarah Killen’, as well as a fan page with 150 members.

So what’s the point of all of this? It looks like @LovelyButton’s follower growth may have peaked already (see this graph of mentions), and is not likely to have a major resurgence without additional support from Conan (he tweeted about her again today) or her media appearances. Still, I believe that this event provides a valuable case study for understanding the impact of the network effect on virtual influence. Through the strength of his relationship with his audience, Conan was able to compel over 10,000 of them to take a discrete action: to follow @LovelyButton simply because he chose her.

And beyond Conan’s role in identifying her, we can also observe here the way in which the virtual audience achieves a level of agency in their choice to participate in and experience the event of @LovelyButton’s selection. In the same way that Facebook users will choose a pickle over a rock band, 4chan users will spoil a news magazine’s reader poll, Slashdot readers will crash an under-prepared server with visits and YouTube viewers will love a video of Susan Boyle singing, what Conan’s choice of Sarah as a tabula rasa for his followers to project themselves onto is indicative of is what influence and attention have become in the virtual world of friends, followers, page views and links.