mediation

Measuring the Groundswell: how Forrester are identifying and quantifying groups and behaviours in the social media space

so I've started reading Groundswell, a book about how social technologies are transforming business, by Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li.  some of its early content is a little objectionable, for example "some people were using Twitter in some pretty silly ways ... giving hourly updates on what they had for lunch or what meeting they had just entered ... that gets pretty insipid after a very short while".

tell that to the kids behind scanwiches - who've created an awesome space which displays cut profiles of globally inspired sandwiches accompanied by simple ingredient captions.  the point is that its not our place to judge.  the world is evolving, and what's a great more important that deciding whats insipid or not is working out how to help brands enter and thrive in a world of social medias.

fortunately then that the authors get beyond this to very usefully classify six groups according to the different activities and applications that people use in the Groundswell; the "social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other; rather that from traditional institutions like corporations".  the classifications are:

• creators - publish blogs / content, maintain a web page, upload content
• critics - who react to other content online, postings comments, ratings or reviews or editing wikis
• collectors - saving URLs and tags or using RSS, collecting and aggregating the internet
• joiners - participating thru maintaining profiles on social networking sites
• spectators - who consume what the rest produce
• inactives - the nonparticipants

all well and good, but  here's the cool bit.  they've created and made public their Social Technographics tool that allows you to profile a group of people based on age, country and sex against these six behaviours.  you can then index them against the general population, allowing you to plan and build social media strategies based on the kinds of behaviour people already demonstrate.  which in Mediation's book is pretty darn cool.

so the profile of 25-34 year only men in the UK looks like this:

with the most predominant behaviours being spectating and joining (66%  and 59% of 25-34 UK men doing those respectively).  but what's interesting is the likelihood of them being collectors, indexing 183 against the all adult population.  the list obsession so loved of the lads mag genre re-invented for the social media space.

does this tell you what your social media strategy should be?  no.  does it help you identify and quantify the predominant behaviours of the people you're trying to target?  yes.  and that's important.  I've sat in two many sessions where the phrase 'we'll get people to create content for us' has been thrown out.  it of course may be the right suggestion, but a little objective rigeur and analysis never hurt anyone.  even if it was about what you had for lunch.

Consumer. I hate the word: why Mediation is adding it's voice to the call for a banning of the word Consumer

so on Friday as I was posting about Clay Shirky's logarithmic rules for participation, the always brilliant Neil at Only Dead Fish was busy banning the word consumer.  Willsh at Feeding The Puppy agreed (and got to grips with some nifty HTML widgeting) and now I've officially added my voice to the chorus via a Twitter post #tagged to #StopUsingConsumer.

consumer?  consumer.  I hate the word.  as I do all words or language that undermine what we do and prevent us as an industry from moving on from basic and retrograde thinking.  the boys have already said much in the posts linked above and I won't repeat.  I'll simply say that too often using the word consumer holds us back in three ways:

1. it leads to thinking that all people do is consume stuff.  this isn't only limiting thought but massively missing the opportunity to engage with PEOPLE on terms beyond them buying stuff.  PEOPLE are talking about, creating for, arguing against, fighting for and remixing brands and branded communications all the time.  don't limit the scope of what we do to PEOPLE consuming what we're selling.

2. it leads to thinking that all PEOPLE are the same.  my post from Friday covered this but essentially my argument was that we are still, by and large, expected to think of and present 'one' target audience...  an 'averaged' person or group based on some attribute of attributes that are most relevant to the brief.  but 'average' not only fails to capture the few individuals who would be super-involved in what we have to say or ask them to do, but massively over-estimates the extent to which most people will commit attention to our branded projects.

3.it looks backwards to world where we bought therefore we were.  rather than forward to a world where brands and brand projects and communications add social as well as just economic value to our lives and communities.  for many brands the idea of giving back won't be an add-on, but rather an intrinsic and expected part of what they do.  giving back will become - as it should be - a cost of being in business.

sold?  join in.  if you believe we should stop using 'consumer', then post a tweet that contains #StopUsingConsumer, and the reason.  For instance: #StopUsingConsumer - cos there's no average user, no average consumer, no average contributor, co-creator, or co-collaborator. live with it.

A new lore of averages: what Clay Shirky and the Coney Island Mermaid Parade can teach us about defining target audiences

insight after insight from Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody.  the above chart is copied from chapter five which covers collaborative production. it shows contributors to the Coney Island Mermaid Parade Flickr site ranked by the number of photos they contributed.  a couple of users contributed the most whilst the most users contributed only a little.  Shirky observes that:

"...the imbalance is the same shape across a huge number of different kinds of behaviours.  a graph of the distribution of tags on Flickr is the same shape as the graph of readers-per-weblog and contributions-per-user to Wikipedia.  the general form of a power law distribution appears in social settings when some set of items - users, pictures, tags - is ranked by frequency of occurrence"

that there's a massive imbalance between people who contribute in collaborative projects we know.  but its something that we don't often enough plan for in a media world where we increasingly ask (the audience formerly known as) consumers to user-generate and co-create on our behalf.  Shirky goes on to point out that:

"...the imbalance drives large social systems rather than damaging them.  fewer than two percent of Wikipedia users ever contribute, yet that us enough to create profound value for millions of users ... the spontaneous division of labour driving Wikipedia wouldn't be possible if there were concern for reducing inequality rather than limiting it ... large social systems cannot be understood as a simple aggregation of the behaviour of some nonexistent 'average' user"

and there you have it.  he said it.  there's no such thing as the average user.  we all know this, and yet we still struggle to capture the targets for our advertising campaigns in neat tangible soundbites.  the demographics of old have (thankfully) long gone, but whilst they're been replaced by more contemporary means - attitudinal or usage based targeting - our one-dimensional thinking too often remains...

we are still, by and large, expected to think of and present 'one' target audience.  an 'averaged' person or group based on some attribute of attributes that are most relevant to the brief.  but look again at where the mean 'average' sits in the above chart... it not only fails to capture the few individuals who would be super-involved in what we have to say or ask them to do, but massively over-estimates the extent to which most people will commit attention to our branded projects.

we need a new lore of averages for our targeting-think.

when we describe target audiences we should be thinking of them as sitting along the above spectrum.  how do we plan on one hand for the very few but valuable super-attention givers from whom a lot of the effectiveness of the media investment will derive?  whilst on the other hand plan for the 'mode' individuals, the vast majority who will contribute the smallest amount of attention to what we have to say?

this spectrum, this logarithmic curve of attention, exists at whatever level you aggregate.  be it a population, or an age range, or any segment no matter how - whether attitudinally or behaviourally - it is defined.  there is no average user, no average consumer, no average contributor, co-creator, or co-collaborator.  let's stop kidding ourselves and clients otherwise.

Staying focussed on the consumer: how Facebook is taking us beyond the demographic

Facebook came into Vizeum's Qube this morning to present their view on the world and how it, and we, are being changed by social networking. they described the extent to which the development of the platform is dictated by actual consumer behaviour; they observe and identify the top six consumer behaviours then replicate / develop site usage to facilitate those behaviours.

they had the same advice for advertisers using the platform.  not surprisingly, those brands that add utility and talk to Facebook users on their terms, get more engagement.  with more engagement comes more data, which is where it gets interesting.

in 2002 I wrote a presentation to my then company (Concord) about how and why we - as planners - needed to get beyond the demographic to understand with more granularity the lives, attitudes and behaviours of the people we were targeting.  the answer then was modal targeting with outdoor; out drinking, commuting etc...  what can we assume from where people are what they're doing and thinking.

how the world has changed.

Facebook stats can now tell you how not only how many people enegaged with you and what (claimed ;o) demographic they are, but also what - in real time - their hobbies and interests are...  this may not sound like a massive step but compared to what I had as a planner seven years ago its a significant step.  and I suspect we haven't really scratched the surface...

the data will only get more prolific, more granular.  with this comes the opportunities for harder-working insights and learnings about the people we want to engage with, or more crucially, the people who want to engage with us.