QH: Twitter: Enable Communities, that's a cash-worthy asset

I'm not going to speculate on Twitter's plans for making money or how they could do it. Except for one idea that struck me today.

One of the "people" that I follow is a cafe in #yyc (Calgary) called @kawacalgary (I'm not sure what "Kawa" means, but it is a cool coffee shop). Looking at Kawa's twitter account, I noticed that it didn't really have that many followers: only 44.

But I know something about each of those followers:

• I know that those people like Kawa Coffee (why else would they follow it on twitter?)

For Kawa, this is a permission asset1. Certainly Kawa could continue the conversation they have with each of these people.

But what about me?

I'm not sure what the right system would be, but I think that it would be good if twitter allowed for some measure of interaction between "followers" of a business.

I don't want to spam them all and twitter's interaction is different from a comment board or Facebook-style "wall." (I'm also not advocating for spamming the followers.)

My point is that there must be some what to better organize the system (twitter) around the facts:

• There is a permission asset2 there: people have expressed interest in the product and having a conversation with it.
• There is a communal feeling around shared knowledge: meeting people (in person) who frequent my favorite coffee shops has a serendipitous effect. Why not create that feeling online?
• Any given person knows some of that community, but not most of it.
• Enabling relationships would increase the perception of the brand.

It seems to me that if companies spend lots of money on "micro-sites" for various brands, they'd be willing to engage people in a similar, but different, fashion via twitter.

Links & Notes

Links: @kawacalgary on Twitter. Kawa Calgary's website (currently under construction, recently was online).

1. It's a permission asset in the sense that Kawa's followers are saying: "I want to know more about your service, you have permission to tell me more." This bodes well for the rumor that Twitter would charge businesses to use the service: if it means that customers can express interest in and give some permission to a business, that has some value.
2. The current "permission asset" in twitter is hard to gauge: a "follow" means different levels of engagement to different people (arguably Facebook friends and LinkedIn connections are also vague in a similar way). But there is a definite permission asset there.