Twitter listens in on Congress. Are you to follow?

Digital guru Mat Morrison of Porter Novelli has mapped the Twitter connections between U.S. congressmen and women. He explains: "The direction of the arrows show who follows whom, and the size of the blobs indicates how 'popular' a given congressperson is among their twittering peers." Red and blue dots denote Republicans vs. Democrats. (Click map to enlarge.)

This is intriguing on two levels. First, you see some users -- primarily Republicans -- rely on Twitter for heavy two-way communication, vs. others who connect infrequently and only one way. That's the difference between pushing messages shallowly and really engaging.

But second, this points out that one value of social media lies behind the scenes, as outside agencies and companies learn to track the connections between individuals and use them for business intelligence purposes. If nothing else, this could help sales in other marketing channels. A classic approach in direct marketing is to target consumers who are "lookalikes" to other consumers. A recent study by AT&T found that social acquaintances within phone networks are 5 times more likely to respond to direct marketing offers, the logic being birds of a feather shop together, or buy the same stuff. Add it up, and social network maps create a new form of customer valuation model in which you can place values on entire networks of target consumers -- based on their interpersonal relationships.

Thus the real value of Facebook and Twitter may not be in their use as outbound marketing devices or even inbound listening for customer service, but in the intelligent mapping of communications between people ... for a God-like view of how humans interact, and how, perhaps unfortunately, those connections might be manipulated.