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.
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