Business and Blogging

Assessing Levels of Social Computing Participation for More Effective Marketing

by Des Walsh on April 30th, 2007

I’m working with some colleagues on a couple of business initiatives and as a keen blogger I am naturally thinking about how to use blogs to help with the marketing.

And precisely because I am a blogger and I read and comment on other blogs, check my RSS readers regularly, listen to podcasts and am generally an engaged social networking, social computing person, I need to be careful not to project my interests and enthusiasms unthinkingly onto our target audience.

Some research would help.

So I was interested to pick up on a couple of blog posts about the Social Technographics® report issued this month by the Forrester research company and available for download ($297).

What caught my eye, with the blog posts, was the ladder image from the report, illustrating six levels of “social computing” behaviors, in terms of participation. You can see the ladder - and another interesting illustration of how the levels can be used to help in planning, at Dan Farber’s post Climbing the Social Web Ladder .

The six levels, with percentages of participation (described), based on the adult US population, are:

• Creators 13%
• Critics 19%
• Collectors 15%
• Joiners 19%
• Spectators 33%
• Inactives 52%

In the Executive Summary, Charlene Li, report author with Josh Bernoff, comments:

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.

Wise advice. What I would love to know is whether any readers of this blog have done or know of any other research, no matter how qualitative or limited in scope, to establish what kind of participation, to use the Forrester term, people in their market would have.

And assuming some companies, large or small, have done that kind of analysis, it would be great to have some examples of how, say a blogging, or social media strategy was framed or adjusted in the light of the analysis. And to what effect.

An interesting suggestion from Dan Farber is to think about ways to help move people in your target market up the ladder of participation:

I suppose you could also try to come up with ways to move a target audience climb up the social media ladder with various schemes, such as better tools and incentives, to turn them into unintended marketers or evangelists (or critics) for a product or service.

But maybe not spending a lot of time on the 52% Inactives :)

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