Micro Ambassadors

The recent twitterguru polls conducted by itwote was a neat social experiment. The idea was to choose the person on twitter (in India) most loved by all. In that sense, the number of followers a person had or the number of tweets did not, though i did feel that the person with more followers did have a distinct advantage. Incidentally, the person with the maximum followers did win, though I’m still debating my point, with myself.

However, the social experiment for me was completely different. It had to do with what I think would be the long tail of twitter popularity. While the final nominations were only 5 people, the amount of nominations were much larger. It made me realise that in the vast set of twitter users, many of us look up to others, pay attention to what they have to say, follow the links they share, in essence, extend to microblogging, the milieu of blogging.

But there is a crucial difference – the twitterstream. Which means that in some ways it is also a broadcast medium. So, while I may not follow a blog because it predominantly covers stuff I’m not interested in, and therefore end up missing an interesting conversation that happens there, such a scenario is less common on twitter. So, my reach on twitter would most likely be more than my blogs.

So, I was wondering about the concept of micro ambassadors. Let me show you through an example. The movie Dasvidaniya. We had a lot of discussions around it – the origin of the word, the website, and thanks to chupchap, I realised that the dasvidaniya website had, in addition to the Facebook and Orkut groups a very cool application, that tied in with very well with the movie – a Thing To do list, and by connecting friends, it could’ve made a very good social viral. Yes, there are many such apps, but this one has a context. I know at least 4-5 more people who were equally interested in the movie. And we were playing out the role of micro ambassadors. Now this might be a small number to begin with, but with an interesting app, and the long tail of twitter popularity, we sould’ve convinced at least a few to watch the movie.

The value add here is that as a regular twitterer, I know other twitterers who’d be interested in a particular subject. What does it take – a few free tickets, in other words, product sampling. The duration of the micro ambassadorship should be decided by the kind of product, and the experience time it requires. In the case of the movie, it would be say, a couple of weeks.  A group of people passionate about a product./service, convinced about the value, spreading the news to others who’d be interested. While there are many stories of blogs being used for a viral spread, I haven’t come across many on twitter. It perhaps is a lack of awareness.

But it raises a question for me. While I believe that both blogging and microblogging have their unique place on the web, does twitter, because of the way it is used, lend itself more to brand usage than blogs? Micro ambassadors, because they may not have the ‘star value’ of bloggers, and are relying on the long tail of popularity on twitter. Is it even better than social networks, where there perhaps might be constraints like viewership being limited to real life friends? I’m also wondering about new networks like Afinito (via Startup Meme), a service that connects you to other people with similar interests, or Orbius, a ‘safe and controlled environment for brands and companies to connect with their customers’.

What do you think?

until next time, now for a revenue model 😉