Brand value as proxy for Twitter value

Interesting nugget from Reuters:

Some 75 percent of people surveyed said they view companies that microblog -- sending short, frequent messages on sites like Twitter or status updates on social networks like Facebook -- as more deserving of their trust than those that do not.

This fact should be shown to sceptics who chafe at Twitter's 'exospheric' ($1bn+) valuation, and are constantly asking to see the business model. True, it doesn't (yet) have much of it's own business model per se, but heck it's providing tons of value to the businesses that use it. 

To take some very simplistic and crude, but B.I.G. numbers: the collective value of the world's top 100 brands is estimated to be over $2 trillion, so if the Twitter-effect accounts for just 1% of that goodwill, the thing's generating (though obviously not capturing) $20bn of value. Not bad for a poor man's email.