|
   
Understanding Technographics
To fully understand what your Social Media Marketing efforts can produce, you must understand your Technographical profile for your customers, prospects and all others who may participate in your community. A logical 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.
Canada: Forrester’s North American Technographics Benchmark Survey, Q1, 2008, 61,033 respondents.
Data from Forrester Research Technographics® surveys, 2008. For further details on the Social Technographics profile
How do I best reach my customers?
Technographics classify people by how likely they are to use social technologies, by functional contributions.
- Creators are the most valuable- they contribute content such as video, blog entries, comments etc.
- Critics respond to content in a valuable way- commenting, clarifying, making suggestions, citing new references etc.
- Collectors organize and save content for themselves or others ie. a workgroup or team- tagging, RSS feeds, forwarding,archiving etc.
- Joiners develop profiles on many social sites like MySpace, FaceBook and are mostly passive visitors.
- Spectators just browse and consume content as they feel interested or compelled to do so- video, music, content reading etc.
- Inactives are the holdouts in each demograhic group who do none of the above and do likely have a PC with Internet connections.
90-9-1 Rule of Thumb
The 90-9-1 principle, recently publicized by Community Guy Jake McKee at 90-9-1.com, says that in a community, the rule of thumb is that 90% of visitors only view the content, 9% only comment or react to it, and 1% create it.
This confuses people, and I often get questions about who’s right. In fact, there is no contradiction between these two statements. Let’s examine why.
First of all, the 90-9-1 principle applies to a single site or community. Let’s suppose we are talking about tivocommunity.com, for example. 90-9-1 says that 1% of its members create content. But our surveys might detect a TiVo community member who just reads the Tivo posts, but who is an enthusiastic Barack Obama supporter at myBO.com. Forrester's surveys would call her a Creator. But with regard to tivocommunity.com, Jake’s rule says she’s in the 90% or lurkers. No contradiction, it just depends on whether you're looking at a single site or across all sites. Since Creators (in the Forrester sense) include people who create content at any site, they add up to a lot more than 1%
Second, our groups are designed to overlap. Since we also identify Collectors (who organize content) and Joiners (who join social networks), there’s no strict hierarchy. Some Joiners are Creators, some Creators are Joiners, but neither group is a subset of the other. (When creating Social Technographics I attempted to create a hierarchy of behaviors, but carefully examining the data convinced me that was a mistake.) So we allow our categories to overlap. 90-9-1, which examines fewer activities, can accommodate mutually exclusive categories.
Third, 90-9-1 is a rule of thumb. For example, according to 90-9-1.com, only 0.16% of YouTube visitors upload content, far less than 1%. A community of Webmasters will have a lot more contributors than a community of senior citizens. Our surveys are actual data independent of site-to-site variation. (So I don’t get to create a nice neat rule, while Jake can.)
What’s it mean? It means that 90-9-1 is a good rule of thumb for sites, while Social Technographics is a good way to look at populations.
This article Originally Posted: 23 Nov 2008 07:38 PM CST
by Josh Bernoff of Groundswell |
Technographics -an overview