My good friend Beverly read my blog post The Web, The Future and Who Wins! and posed these questions: How do individuals without huge bankrolls make good ideas profitable. How does a little guy get capital in a credit constrained environment? And how does a little guy get economies of scale for production to test an idea?

Beverly was once in big time marketing, now she is a minister. So you can hear both sides of her life in the question: the big biz person and the socially conscious one.

Great Ideas. Everyday each of us has at least one. So the key is choosing the right one. Getting to the right idea means doing due diligence: researching the market, exploring the competition, seeing how it can be done better, talking to prospective customers, inquiring how much they would value your idea, how much they are willing to pay for it. Then it requires pulling out the spreadsheets and running the numbers in best and worst case scenarios.

Capital in a Constrained Environment. How do you get it? You don’t. Great businesses are built on guile, a shoestring and low personal overhead. Great businesses require enormous creativity, great relationships with others and a willingness to change things up when things aren’t going right. Sometimes it means giving up on the original dream. It can mean barter, going off-shore to lower costs, enlisting passionate “volunteers” who promote you and, in return, you promote with a passion.

When you have no money, you understand that you must be profitable from early in the game. And that means your idea has to work — or you cut your losses, dump it or change it up. It is a highly efficient way to operate. Business Darwinism. No more bloated profitless Facebooks, yours will be a real business from Day 1.

Economies of Scale. The Web, the future and who wins? Businesses that deliver unique value to small slices of the market and that means they operate at solid margins that negate the need for “scale”. If you choose to scale, you risk your own capital and self-fund it, but if you are making a comfortable middle-class income is it worth the risk? How much do we each really require to live a decent life? That’s for you and you alone to decide – without bankers, investors or venture capitalists breathing down your neck. The freedom to make that decision is called success. When enough of us get to that decision we will have experienced a Capitalist Revolution.

A most remarkably huge section of the Wall Street Journal was wasted today on Follow The Tweets an article by three professors who set out to attempt to predict which movie would do best at the box office based on Tweets.

Reading the article was like watching a bunch of accountants put a dollar value on “good will” in a business valuation. These three academic stooges created a “model” of course. And used LOTS of servers to store LOTS of Tweets on three movies launched on the same day.

They used Twitter’s “advanced” search feature that is “capable” of measuring whether a Tweet is good or bad based on emoticons vs . OMG!  Even our academics had to admit this is not scientific. I hung in and read on…

Their “model” was a “bit” more sophisticated. REALLY? Their model adjusted for “language” issues, as in when people are talking vacuum cleaners and Tweet “it sucks!” that would be a good Tweet. Language is nuanced and notoriously tough to measure in any quantitative fashion, and it certainly can’t be done on a broad scale (thus Twitter’s silly emoticon measurement).  How much more sophisticated could these professors’ model be beyond emoticon measurement? Not much.

They were able to successfully “predict” the biggest grossing movie – but only in retrospect, which is not really predicting is it?

Beyond the obvious problems, they’re data was purely relational, there was no way of knowing how many Tweets make a winner, just that one movie got more “positive” Tweets than the others. But it could have easily been a statistically insignificant number. And here is the kicker: the true predictive information was available within 24 hours of the first weekend release, not in Tweets, but in the box office receipts. DUH.

This only proved one thing: there are enough Tweets about movies to give three professors enough data to write something utterly inane and enough ignorant editors at the WSJ to approve the article.

For other large industries this model is hardly applicable.  Products do not launch at the same time. Not everyone who Tweets is your customer. There maybe a whole lot more people who are your customers and have very strong “predictive” feelings who NEVER Tweet.

For the rest of us, in businesses and industries outside mass appeal – that would be the vast majority of companies and small businesses – this exercise is TOTALLY useless.  We are trees falling in a Tweetless forest.  Turning to Tweets as a predictive measure is a waste of time. Meaningful interactions with our customers and prospects via the medium THEY prefer a far better use of our time.