A funny thing happened on the way to social media stardom on Monday: we lost all our Twitter followers. Sure, we tried to play it cool. None of us would ever admit that suddenly having zero followers was a blow to the ego. After all, it's not how many followers you have, it's the quality of the relationships, right? 

Admit it. You freaked out just a little. And you weren't alone.

Rationally, we know it's not about those numbers. In fact, when Twitter went down, one of its stars, Tara Hunt, opined:

You know it's not about the followers, too. We recently asked on our Facebook Page what social media stats you consider most important to track. Nobody said number of followers.

But when I'm out and about and ask folks about their social media forays, I never hear about interactions and relationships. I hear about what tools they're using -- and how many fans they have.

You have to assume that part of this discrepancy is simple human nature: we all want to be the popular kid. But it's also because it's easy. It's easy to count something as simple as the number of followers or fans. It is not, however, easy to quantify relationships.

We tried to get a little closer to it with that Facebook conversation. Here's my favorite summary:

Punch per post! I love it! But it's still just an idea. 

Beth Kanter had a great post a couple of weeks ago about the variety of social media metrics she puzzles over. Allyson Kapin wrote another piece you should read about measuring your impact on Twitter. We're circling around something here, but I have to wonder, can we ever find the answer we are looking for? Or, will it have to be enough to be close?  

Maybe social media metrics are a little like horseshoes.