I’ve been pretty excited over the last week about the new experiences coming up so I did some digging around and found Sutori.com which is a Blast Radius sponsored pro-sumer driven social network for people to connect and share their experiences and information about products and companies.

The whole concept behind Blast’s success seems to be very much that the marketplace has changed. Consumers now hold the power and as a result, they believe companies need to get smarter in order to please this new level of connected consumer.

I read and responded to a particular blog post on the Sutori blog, talking about second hand experiences and their worth to the community at large. This really intrigued me and I responded with my initial opinion:

I think that you bring up a very interesting point here. Often people will consider second or third hand stories as a form of broken telephone, in which the content cannot be trusted. I’d like to draw reference to a piece of literature called ‘Blink’ by Malcolm Gladwell in which he references to ‘thin-slicing’. Often through word of mouth, context is diluted or changed, but generally in the first X amount of steps, the message will remain the same without the saturation of frustration that can be found in first person. The results highlight the original and (possibly?) make a more dense overall consumer experience to base future engagements with relation to the brand in question. This being said, it could very well be that a second or third hand story can possibly be more directly helpful to a consumer looking to make a decision than a first hand encounter as long as the message maintains a an accurate ‘thin-sliced’ version of the original message.

With that said, I started thinking about the type of social network that Sutori really is in relation to another book by Malcom Gladwell entitled The Tipping Point where Mr Gladwell goes on to dissect the reasons and motivations behind a true social epidemic, the kind that are often found in the natural wide scale adoption of a product or trend. Gladwell describes three types of people who make these epidemics occur.

Connectors, people with a vast social circle who specialize in the ‘weak tie’. Mavens, people with extraordinary product knowledge who have a natural need to help people get them the best based on their own personal experience, and Salesmen, the people who actually sell the idea that this product and experience lives up to the hype.

My thought is that Sutori is by nature a very “Maven”-esq network, however it seems that most of the content so far mostly relates to bad experiences with a brand and revolve around warning others. This raises the following question:

How could one use the power of a social network like Sutori to procure positive experiences that can then be shared to all three types of social pro-sumer so that the end result is a widely distributed word of mouth that is overall positive for a brand but also allows for the necessary warnings that protect the pro-sumer network?

Once I thought about this I remembered a site that a friend of mine started a little while ago called mywebvine.ca and I realized that this is one example of how the social graph can really do a great job of promoting positive brand recognition through word of mouth.

So I guess that shows that there are people out there considering both sides of the puzzle. I’m interested to see different ways that the combination of both models can be incorporated so that not only can consumers warn other consumers, but they can also promote good products and in essence start their own little social epidemic around a product that really deserves it.