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Social Media: The Social World Classified
Charlene Li at Forrester has segmented the Social World into participant types that are depicted as rungs on a ladder. The higher the participant ranks on the ladder, the more the participant creates original content that is made available to others.
It’s an interesting way to partition up the world of social media. A single person may belong to different categories across many social media or collaboration groups. Forrester recommends companies that create communities with their customers or users try to use this classification method as a way for categorizing collaborator types. Depending upon the type of collaborator, Forrester recommends a tune their communications. In this way companies can created targeted ‘social strategies’ for interacting with their community.
Forrester’s Li commented that “I’ve used the participation ladder to help figure out which social strategies to deploy first – and also how to encourage users to climb up, so to speak, from being Spectators to becoming more engaged. It’s my belief that not everyone is cut out from the start to be a Creator; nor is everyone inclined to jump with both feet into social networking. Companies seeking to engage customers with these new tools need to understand where their audiences are with this categorization.”
Forrester has used this tool for tracking social media activity since 2007. Their latest numbers suggest that people have become more social and less passive in their social interactions — they found that the number of ‘conversationalists’, for example, is on an upward trend. And an interesting demographic is that a majority of the conversationalists are women in their 30’s.
