BUZZ NEWS

Miss World’s Social Network

Posted on November 20, 2008
Jessica Hartstein

If you haven’t gone Web 2.0 yet, you just might be the last one to do it! Even the Miss World contest is creating an online social network for this year’s competition. Wondering what a beauty pageant social network is like? The competition’s partnership with the New York based media platform Amuso offers visitors several possibilities.

The Amuso social network is centered around the contestants and will allow Internet users to read about the contestants, send them messages, view their photos, and even vote for their favorite contestants. Creating something of this sort certainly assumes that people are interested enough in the Miss World contest to spend more than just the 3 hours watching it on TV. The expectation is that people will be intrigued enough to find out about the contestants beforehand and even to take the time to vote on their favorites. I suppose I should never underestimate the power bikini clad women have on men with too much free-time, but I wonder if this beauty contests’ social network really will be the success it is hoping for.

What is likely, however, is that Amuso will attract new visitors and likely new customers. Amuso runs an interesting contest platform, charging contestants $1 entrance fees, offering money to contest winners and to contest organizers. NGOs are given special treatment in that Amuso waives its fess for NGO fundraising contests. It would be wonderful if more NGOs could use Amuso to help raise money for their efforts.

While the Miss World contest has gone 2.0, we’ll have to wait until December 13th to find out if any of the contestants have more 2.0-ish answers to that fateful question, “How would you make the world a better place?” Think anyone will go for, “I’d bring Twitter to African classrooms”? In any event, let’s hope their answers go a bit better than this one did for the buzz queen Miss Teen South Carolina 2007: