The real power comes when a digital marketing property can index its audience compared not only to the average customer, but to the affluent customer.

Last month -- June 2011 -- marked the second anniversary of the end of the Great Recession, at least as "officially" declared by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the recognized arbiter of such economic issues.

Last year, in the wake of the 2009 credit crisis, some colleagues and I discovered that our recruiting specifications for affluence didn't consistently produce affluent people. Also, we noticed a different tone in the media about affluence. The term "the Rich" began to infiltrate headlines. And, references to the "Mass Affluent" disappeared. Our search for answers led us to perform our own study leveraging data from the annual Mendelsohn Affluence Survey.

Findings from a new study on influence raise the issue of income vs. momentum online and question the conventional priorities of media targeting.