Although our once fairly (or at least fairly well believed) monolithic consumer culture has fragmented at the hands of distributed technologies such as the internet in general, humans still crave to find communities composed of individuals who share similar world views, ideologies and aspirations.

Affiliate marketing has an incredible potential to tap into these new emerging collectives by way of influencer networks and local hubs. In other words, bring the mini A Lists from each of these collections of niched groups to your affiliate program, and you are not just mining the long tail, but creating entirely new X and Y axis each with their own respective long tails.

THAT’s the future of marketing, and I think affiliate marketing in particular.

So, how do we bring in these community hubs, get to know them and make them product evangelists? You guessed it… through platforms such as Twitter.

Wired’s Clive Thompson points to this property of emerging collectives in a nicely composed article today. In the piece, he balances out some of the criticisms Twitter faces (voyeuristic narcissism from a group of whiny tech savvy emo kids)…

So why has Twitter been so misunderstood? Because it’s experiential. Scrolling through random Twitter messages can’t explain the appeal. You have to do it ? and, more important, do it with friends. (Monitoring the lives of total strangers is fun but doesn’t have the same addictive effect.) Critics sneer at Twitter and Dodgeball as hipster narcissism, but the real appeal of Twitter is almost the inverse of narcissism. It’s practically collectivist ? you’re creating a shared understanding larger than yourself.

However, there are still those who insist that Twitter should be chastised, spanked and sent back to the corner of the classroom so that it can think about all the trouble it has been causing in the once well defined tech media world. For example, Donna Bogatin responds with her own jaded, presumptuous and increasingly out of touch prose about Twitter (specifically Dave Winer’s TwitterGram platform):

No need to wonder about what Winer was blending yesterday, thanks to the mighty Twitter itself: ?Fresh cherries?!

Yes, thanks to the narcissism enabling and voyeurism enducing Twitter, the world was put on notice on July 6, 2007, at 12:16 am, by Dave Winer, that the same Dave Winer was ?eating cherries? at that precise moment AND the verdict, to boot: ?Very much not disgusting.?

Winer, not one to leave his Twitter ?friends and followers? in a cherry eating dark, graciously Twittered in but a moment later to advise and assure: ?Current temp in Berkely, 55 degrees F. Great sleeping weather, in just a few minutes after I polish off these cherries.?

Rather than snubbing noses and declaring communications not written by yourself to be narcissistic, marketers should be paying attention to the unavoidable growth of presence platforms such as Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku and Facebook’s notification feature and how these platforms are shaping the way that both young and old (but mostly young) communicate.

It has always amazed me that marketers (of all people!) are the most self-centered and non-curious lot of humans on the planet. We are so sure that our mode of thinking will transfer in our marketing messages and we continue to assume that what worked (or just got us by in terms of the bottom line) will always be the best solution for our marketing endeavors. That’s simply not the case and leaning on the everlasting arms of constancy is not always the safest bet.

So, let’s get outside our own head, look at people beyond 1950’s metrics and realize the potential that lies in our collective reach.

Clive Thompson on How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense