There's been a lot of stories written on the debt ceiling, and I'm sure there will be more to come as Congress inches ever-closer to something resembling a deal. There's been some good stories, some intriguing stories, some frustrating stories, and some ridiculous stories. For the purposes of this blog post, I'm going to focus on two ridiculous stories.

This CNN clip is just utterly ridiculous. Almost funny, really. But seriously, I don't want to see Papa John's commercials, err, segments, during a news clip. He even got the full slogan in! I'll let the clip speak for itself.

The second article was one that focuses on Obama losing thousands of followers on his @BarackObama Twitter handle after he (meaning his campaign) tweeted the names and contact information of every Republican legislator in an effort to encourage the public to contact their member or Senators in regards to the debt deal. The story, and every other subsequent article, focused on one thing, and on one thing only: that he lost the Twitter followers, as if that is the most important thing out there.

First thing's first - the premise of the article is correct -- they did lose thousands of Twitter followers. But if you use the number cited by the New York Post - 37,000 (although that's probably never a good idea, but here goes), that means the account lost 0.004 percent of its more than 9 million followers -- a drop in the bucket. But even given that, the news coverage is still missing the point. This only matters if Obama's (team's) long-term goal is to gain a maximum number of Twitter followers.

But why should that be the only metric that is measured? Who's to say their long-term goal isn't awareness of not only the debt issue, but the fact that the Obama campaign is still at the forefront of new and innovative ways to use the Internet that allow ordinary citizens to engage with their government? They may have lost a lot (actually, only a relative few) of their followers, but how many of their followers actually contacted their representatives? While we don't know, I would presume it was at least some. Even the NY Post acknowledges that point -- from a previous version of the story:

"The campaign appears to have served its purpose: Republican Twitter accounts were flooded with pleas for compromise."

Obama doesn't seem to be hurting for Twitter followers...

"While his follower number appears to have taken its biggest dive in recent memory, Obama’s Twitter account still had a whopping 9,362,880 followers at 7:30pm Friday night, down from 9,402,898 Friday morning - and he's still the third-most followed person on the planet."

Even if they didn't contact their representatives, it allows the Obama team to continue the narrative that they're using technology to give ordinary citizens a voice. And ultimately, that's more important than the actual number of Twitter followers you have at the end of the day. Twitter followers don't get you votes. Why? Because I think it's safe to say that the vast majority of people following @BarackObama already have an opinion on him that Tweets won't changes. You're already following the account for a reason -- Tweets probably won't change your opinion on the President; rather, they may help influence what your thinking on particular issues or help shape your exposure to certain issues.

The perception that the President is engaging with ordinary citizens through nontraditional means plays a part in getting you votes. And at the end of the day, that's all that matters. Oh, and raising the debt ceiling.

That brings up a whole different issue, one that goes beyond politics and even journalism. In today's horse-race driven media culture, numbers are the only thing that matters in politics. Whether it's money or social media, if you have the "most," you're the automatic frontrunner. While that's true in a lot of cases, few journalists dig deeper to analyze the impact of those numbers, especially with social media. Just because you have a lot of "fans," what are you doing to mobilize them? Are you just pushing out talking points, or are is there two-way communication? Journalists don't take it one step further and analyze the overall strategy and impact of these social media tools. Just as journalists don't know how to cover social media as part of the larger campaign narrative, many brands still don't know how to effectively use social media to get their message out. They make the same mistake the media makes -- that it's only about the numbers rather than the quality of the fans and the quality of the communication you are having with them. There's an ongoing debate in the advertising world about how much a Facebook "like" or a Twitter follower is actually worth, a debate that won't end any time soon, I'm sure.

Let's hope the debt debate ends sooner...