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.

The greatest impediment to success for businesses on the Internet is their overall structure. Businesses are structured in a top down manner that demands continued growth and expansion for success. Power is centralized in the hands of a few who attempt to move masses of consumers their way through vehicles of mass influence. But the Web, is the disruptive technology upending that paradigm.

The Web is the business parallel universe. The place where small is big, niche is king and the power is in the hands of the individual. The traditional vehicles of mass influence: broadcast, print and the like are dead. Centralized influence continues to be confounded by the power and influence of the individual.

Which is why we are in the middle of a massive Capitalist Revolution. A tectonic transfer of power. It reminds me of the Lily Tomlin line, “did you hear about the lab rats that changed the behavior of lab technicians by refusing pellets?”  Before consumers could either choose to buy or not to buy. Today consumers can change the behavior of corporations, not just by refusing their offerings but by insisting on not buying until the Internet serves up the least expensive price causing a a lemming race to the bottom by retailers. A suicide move if ever there was one!

But individuals are not just consumers, they are entrepreneurs as well. And the Internet favors the most creative and industrious among them. Individual online entrepreneurs can do well what no centralized corporate power can. They can reach into small slices of the marketplace where Passionistas live and play and they can commune with them. And sell to them profitably in a most authentic manner.

What is critical is that these industrious individuals create something unique, relevant and important to these slice markets. Yes, it is a Capitalist model, but one that recognizes that one small market can deliver a margin that delivers a solid middle class life style.

Individual entrepreneurs have an opportunity to own loyal passionate markets that  completely elude large corporations. Within the next decade we will witness the rise of small, self-funded business and the death of corporate power, by a combination of thousand cuts AND massive self-inflicted wounds.