Conversation joins the ladder | Online PR and social media agency

Conversation joins the Social Technographics ladder

January 22nd, 2010 by Lloyd Gofton

Back in April 2007, when Liberate Media was just a year old, and the social media question was still very much ‘if’ and not ‘when’, Forrester’s Charlene Li and Josh Bernhoff wrote a paper called Social Technographics

The executive summary for which is overviewed below:
‘Many companies approach Social Computing as a list of technologies to be deployed as needed - a blog here, a podcast there - to achieve a marketing goal. But a more coherent approach is to start with your target audience and determine what kind of relationship you want to build with them, based on what they are ready for. Forrester categorizes Social Computing behaviours into a ladder with six levels of participation; we use the term Social Technographics® to describe a population according to its participation in these levels. Brands, Web sites, and any other companies pursuing social technologies should analyze their customers’ Social Technographics first and then create a social strategy based on this profile.’

If you are a digital marketer, you’re no doubt familiar with Social Technographics, as many of the related models and thinking from agencies all over the world were either based on, or used parts of, this profile to develop their own thinking. However, the all encompassing rungs and often simplified definitions have also been criticised as they are not specific or far reaching enough. I think that although these criticisms make a good point in terms of accuracy, the model is very useful to help communicate strategies and considering it’s based on Forrester’s own primary research.

Furthermore, the primary data that Forrester used to develop Social Technographics took into consideration how consumers approach social technologies, going beyond simple adoption figures that don’t necessarily tell the whole story as people try out technologies and leave them before settling on a group of favoured tools or methods.

So here’s the original profile:

As you can see the Social Technographics ladder was divided into six different categories of participation. It’s important to note that participation at one level may or may not overlap with participation at other levels, which is why the model was developed as a ladder, with the rungs at the higher end of the ladder indicating a higher level of participation. This is also why the figures don’t add up to 100%.

The model has worked well, but as we know social media moves quickly and an update was required, which came this week via Josh Bernhoff (Charlene Li has since left Forrester and founded Altimeter Group) and as overviewed in Advertising Age.

So what has changed? Well, as Josh has explained:

‘As you can see from the graphic, we added a new rung, “Conversationalists”. Conversationalists reflects two changes. First, it includes not just Twitter members, but also people who update social network status to converse (since this activity in Facebook is actually more prevalent than tweeting). And second, we include only people who update at least weekly, since anything less than this isn’t much of a conversation.’

Who are Conversationalists? Josh confirms that ‘they’re 56% female, more than any other group in the ladder. While they’re among the youngest of the groups, 70% are still 30 and up.’

It’s also interesting to note that the data from the new survey continues the trends from the last two and a half years, showing Spectators are up to 70%, Joiners are still growing rapidly, and Creators are growing slowly.

We can also see the number of online consumers not yet using social media is down to 17%, showing room for further growth although it could also be argued there is plenty of room for growth within the 70 % of joiners too.

Josh also highlighted three potential uses for the profile, although there are many more:

1. Convince your boss this stuff is for real, and that if you haven’t jumped on it, you’re late.

2. Profile your customer base, and see what they’re ready for, before planning a project to reach out to them. (After all, People is the first step in the POST process.)

3. Segment your audience; build different strategies for different segments. (Social is so prevalent now that a single approach for your company is probably too broad.)

I wonder what will the next rung on the ladder will represent and how long will it take to appear? Or will the ladder format be rejected for a more complex graphic representing the connected and complex nature of the community as a whole.