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Speaking with the folks over at Tumri.com the other day got me thinking about a new phrase that I’m using, “the wisdom of micro-crowds.” The concept is an expansion of the base theory discussed in James Surowiecki’s “Wisdom of Crowds” and is going to be an important targeting factor for any company that is targeting advertising at consumers.

Micro-crowds are gatherings of many people, often distributed across the globe, often only acquaintances or strangers, but they gather in clumps in order to share information and interests. People have many micro-crowds to which they belong, it might be a friends network on MySpace, it may be an avatar based grouping as in Second Life, but it might also be a speedy and very loose affinity group as in Twitter. The interesting thing about micro-crowd wisdom, is that it is reliant upon a somewhat sketchy tipping point created simply because like-minded people have glommed together in some way.

The idea of using the intelligence of micro-crowds to target the right ads to the right people at the right moment, is a cousin to the “distributed creative development” concept discussed in the March 27, 2007 “Online SPIN” newsletter penned by Joe Marchese.

An example of this micro-targeting and micro-crowd wisdom is the evolving thing that is Twitter. You can reach me on Twitter at twitter.com/briancaldwell

Become my friend and I will let you in on some fun things that are happening here in San Francisco.

Twitter is already writhing with anticipation and experiments. You should create an account and play with the platform simply so you can stay on the edge of the age of web immediacy.

Micro crowds develop “authoritativeship”, where knowledge of products, events, services, skill sets … micro-memes … enables consumers to zero in on what they want to consume with the comfort of knowing that their micro-crowd has created positive buzz around the subject. With micro-targetable ad platforms that feature contextual, behavioral and intuitive prediction, the social eco-sphere which renders micro-crowd wisdom can provide a platform for extremely personalized advertising/consumer relationships.

“Distributed creative development” relies on crowd wisdom to generate new content. Memes are started and followed according to the media available to the micro-crowds (which are formed from friends, colleagues, acquaintances, clients, etc.) and these memes are targetable events. If a gal in Boise, wants to develop a vlog that creates electronics product reviews as content, she attracts a micro-crowd and this in turn generates an opportunity for very specific ad delivery that should, in theory, deliver much higher EPC or ROAS rates than “traditional” ad targeting platforms like DART.

So I am calling 2007 the year of micro. Micro-Micro-publishing as with Tumblr, micro-targeting as with Tumri and micro-crowd wisdom as with Twitter, will drive the creation of many new and wonderful things this year. I’m personally looking forward to what emerges from the current noisy mess.

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