The Numbers Game.

As a child I was fascinated by an Elvis album cover. It showed him resplendent in a gold lama suit with the title "50,000,000 Elvis fans can't be wrong". So before you channel your inner Elvis and give us your best rendition of "hunka hunka burnin love", it wasn't the lama suit that caught my eye but the staggering number on a cover from 1959. I say staggering because in those days to be a fan you actually had to go to the record store and buy the album, you actually had to turn on the TV to watch Elvis on the Ed Sullivan show and you actually had to post a fan letter at the post office. So those 50 million were die hard fans willing to go out of their way to be involved with their idol.

Today it's a lot easier to get fans and a click or two can have your content transferred across the world. With 2 billion Internet users, at least 1 billion of those using Google, 133 million blogs, 800 million Facebook users, 500 million monthly You Tube users, 400,000 android devices activated daily and 100 million dot com domain names registered, 50 million fans seems like an afternoon's work for some like Han Han a Chinese blogger with 340 million readers.

The most influential on the net now have the capacity to change ideas, change culture and bring about change, all from the confines of their lounge room. Without having to attend large rally's, without doing a country tour and without spending time on planes, trains and automobiles people from all walks of life have the opportunity to make a difference if their story is engaging and credible. The ability to find large audiences no longer requires booking agents, writing a hit book or song or even being famous.

People will search you out if they are looking for your story and the ease via multiple search engines, to find what people are looking for with a couple of clicks makes a true fan almost irrelevant. Now those 50 million Elvis fans would only have to download the music, check out the concert on You Tube and give the king a quick tweet about what they thought of his latest hit, all while sitting in a cafe sipping a latte to get the free wifi.

So the numbers today come too easy and the effort behind them doesn't even require getting off the lounge. The places people used to gather like book stores, cinemas, even shopping malls have all noticed the lounge effect but the smart ones like Amazon, Apple, eBay and the like have taken advantage of the numbers game easy access. Even influential writers like Seth Godin who now writes one of the world's most read blogs never needs to leave home to hawk his latest book or even attend conferences. I know because I read his blog and order his e books online while listening to him via TED, You Tube and any other online conference facility available.

All of this makes those Elvis fans, real fans and not just mouse manipulators. Not all the numbers count. Sometimes small numbers with real effort and engagement count for more.