I noticed something yesterday on TechCrunch that caught my eye, “Glue Guru Giveaways Target Online Influencers” was the title.  Essentially, Gurus are power users on Glue.  So, give-aways (in this case tickets to see the movie Wolfman) are a way to motivate people to use the site enough to become a guru.

When I read this though, a few things more interesting than simply incenting Glue users came to mind.  Fred Wilson saw one of these items, the ability for Glue to monetize these “coupons”.  In his post he put it this way:

The reason that is the most interesting reward to me is that it directly leads to the monetization of the service. These rewards are basically another form of coupons or offers and merchants have always responded well to the opportunity to pay a third party for the opportunity to coupon their customers and potential customers.

This would of course be the most interesting thing to Fred Wilson who has an interest (through Adaptive Blue) in Glue as well as several interests in companies that could benefit from similar technologies.  What’s more interesting to me, is a level deeper.   How do the companies that would advertise on Glue benefit?

The simple answer, they can get a list of people who can influence the buying public.  Glue isn’t really selling advertising, they’re selling a list of the most influential people on movies.  If you’re a movie guru you probably go once a week and you love to talk about it.  Your friends and relatives probably ask your opinion.  You’re exactly the kind of person I would pay to see my movie so that you will launch your own “word of mouth” campaign.  The economics are easy.  An $8 cost for the movie ticket and a $25 (let’s just say) cost for Glue to send it to their Gurus is a total of $33.  How much do you think that a positive review of Wolfman from a Guru, published right on Glue’s front page would be worth?  How about making Wolfman the most discussed movie on Glue (likely to happen if all of the power users go see it).  These are worth WAY more then $33 per guru.

This is perhaps the simplest way yet to identify people who are both connectors and mavens (in the speak of Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller Tipping Point).