Twitter can definitely cause some waves. Even if, say, one person can't necessarily tweet, "Followers in X, meet at Y and protest Z!" and cause immediate change, Twitter can certainly set a few gears in motion, though its effects are dicey at best.
Take, for example, Amanda Palmer. Amanda Palmer is a musician from Boston (and wife to author Neil Gaiman) who practically conducts her "business" from Twitter. Aside from using Twitter for the standard fan/non-fan interaction, Palmer uses Twitter as a means to unite her audience and, in some instances, make money. (Here's an informal article written by Palmer illustrating how she made $19,000 in 10 hours via Twitter.) (Here's a music video she casted, filmed, and produced all after about 20 minutes of crowd-sourcing and organizing on Twitter.)
While on tour or traveling around, Palmer will often send out a tweet regarding a "ninja gig," an impromptu public performance akin to busking. Predictably, she manages to pull a respectable amount of people each time. She's coordinated games of soccer in England, borrowed keyboards from fans for between-venue practice, found wedding dresses and clothing for performances or music videos. In short, Amanda Palmer has used Twitter to become closer to her audience.
It's not necessarily surprising that she can tweet a ninja gig and meet with hundreds of people--she currently has over 500,000 followers and it also isn't surprising that when she's in Chicago for a show, hosting a ninja gig in Chicago will attract many of the same people already going to the show. Could you imagine the chaos that would ensue if Lady Gaga (she's easy to pick on, since she's currently the most-followed celebrity) did the same thing?
On the other hand, when Lady Gaga (who rarely interacts directly with fans), Kim Kardashian, Alicia Keys (both celebrities who do a little fan-interaction and healthy retweeting), and other celebrities "died" for a day on Twitter to benefit AIDS research, they didn't fill their goal of $1 million. This begs the question: Is it that we don't care when we have to make an actual contribution? Or, in the case of Amanda Palmer's $19,000, we really only care when we feel closer to the person or feel as though we are helping them directly? The idea of this has been thrown around lately and termed "slacktivism."
Lady Gaga gets a lot of inane @replies (a bizarre mix of idol-worship, follow requests, and a dash of intense hatred) and is a trending topic regular but her 13 million followers can't spare $1 for AIDS. I'm willing to bet that if her life hinged on a crowd-sourced kidney transplant, you might see 1 million kidneys on the block.
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