Social Technographics & Butterfingers April 25, 2007
Forrester Research just released an interesting study led by Charlene Li about social technographics that breaks up web users into distinct and defined categories so that marketers can target their efforts to inspire action.
- Creators - develop media (video, web site, blog, etc.) and publish it to the web
- Critics - comment and review
- Collectors - use RSS feed readers and tag pages
- Joiners - create accounts on social networks
- Spectators - read, watch, or listen to content
- Inactives - don’t really participate on the Internet
Li’s social technographics blog post has percentages of people in the United States who participated at these various levels last fall. It is also important to note that a person can simultaneously act in multiple roles.
After reading the complete study, the thing that stuck out to me the most is that it suggests that marketers train their on-line audiences to gradually assume more complicated roles. For instance, it might prove more fruitful in the long run for a company or organization that wants people to create and publish content on their site to first make sure that the audience already is comfortable with acting as critics by commenting or reviewing existing content or products.
If people don’t comment on a blog post, for instance, why would they suddenly upload a six minute video? The study cites Butterfinger as an example when its company wanted people to upload videos to YouTube; only 59 submissions were posted. Although this campaign garnered significant attention, Butterfinger lovers clearly weren’t prepared to make videos about the candy bar. I wonder if there was an active official Butterfinger blog or MySpace or Facebook group or profile that built and maintained an active on-line community, that more people would have created video tributes to the scrumptious candy bar.
Check out the social technographics study; the full version must be purchased.
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Companies seeking to engage customers with these new tools need to understand where their audiences are with this categorisation and then create bespoke programmes for them. This piece of Forrester research comes at a great time when companies throughout the world are struggling to come to terms with how to reach-out to their customers.
Too often I have seen a ‘one size fits all’ methodology into new media outreach. Hopefully, this kind of research will push vendors to consider that different approaches need to be taken dependent upon the micro-audience that are targeting.
My post backs this up
Jonny,
I agree. Companies cannot expect people to spend a lot of time in new media activities if audiences aren’t doing some basic things first. If they are patient, they can help foster the audience’s desire to participate in social media efforts.