A few years ago, Gene Smith had his stairs tiled. Badly. When the tiles started cracking, he found an online forum, run by a home-improvement aficionado, where professional tilers answered amateurs' questions. Using the advice he got, Mr. Smith negotiated repairs with his contractor.
That was Web 1.0.
Now, the same story, version Web 2.0, would see Mr. Smith go to a forum run by the tile manufacturer. There, the company's own experts would field consumers' questions and criticisms, and post suggestions on blogs for, say, the best tiles to use on stairs. "The conversation would be public, the company opens up to the consumer," says Mr. Smith, an information architect and principal with nForm, an Edmonton "user experience" consulting company.
This type of online interaction between business and consumers is still novel, but marketers are keen to exploit social computing's potential for forging tighter links with their customers. "Companies are just starting to grasp what the social Web can mean for them," says Mr. Smith. "It's an incredibly hard thing to do well."
Which is why a new method for companies to think about social computing, developed by Forrester Research Inc., has been causing buzz online and off. While there are plenty of theories about how people use the Web, Forrester's Social Technographics model actually has data to back it up and concrete pointers on using it. "Many companies approach social computing as a list of technologies to be deployed as needed — a blog here, a podcast there," notes the model's author Charlene Li. "But a more coherent approach is to start [by analyzing] your target audience and determine what kind of relationship you want to build with them."
Ms. Li divides Web users into six categories, or "technographics," which form rungs on a ladder of online participation. The higher up the ladder, the more involved the person is with the social Web. At the top are "creators," who maintain websites or upload videos at least monthly. One rung down are "critics," who comment on blogs or post reviews on sites such as Amazon.com. They, in turn, are followed by "collectors" who save URLs on bookmarking services or use RSS feeds, publishing their finds for all to see.
The bottom three categories include "joiners" — those who simply join social Web communities such as MySpace.com — and "spectators," who serve as the audience for all the social activity online, reading the blogs or listening to the podcasts but not contributing themselves. The last — and, at 52 per cent, by far the largest — group are "inactives," who do none of those things.
Ms. Li and her colleagues have found that, generally, the younger the group, the greater the level of participation. More than a third of teenagers fall into the creators category, while people in their 20s dominate the joiners and Gen Xers are avid spectators. Many older people lurk in social networking sites, but "boomers and seniors need more relevant content and services to get them engaged," writes Ms. Li.
Ms. Li's main point is that marketers need to match their online features to the audience they have or want to have. If your customers are young and evangelical about your brands — as, for example, Apple's or Mattel's consumers are — it makes sense to allow them lots of creative involvement, from suggesting design features to moderating groups. But Mr. Smith notes that deeper customer participation is a blessing and a curse. "You'd have to invest a lot in having everyone deeply engaged. And transitioning people from lower to higher levels of engagements is a concept to be wary of." Some brands just aren't suited to deep engagement. There is surely more blogging about the iPod than about choosing tiles.
There are many other models for thinking of social technology. For example, Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo Inc.'s vice-president of product strategy, places the Web audience on a pyramid, with the 1 per cent at top as creators who start groups or threads, supported by 10 per cent as synthesizers who are active participants in what others launched, and 100 per cent as consumers who benefit from the top two groups' efforts. Yahoo's goal, according to Mr. Horowitz, is to make everyone part of all three groups.
Mr. Smith has adapted existing concepts into Social Software Building Blocks, a honeycomb-shaped model that places six social online activities — such as relationships, conversations and reputation — around the central one of identity. "Different social software sites focus on particular areas," he says. "You never see a site that's a master of all seven domains, except maybe Facebook."
Audrey Carr, senior information architect with Toronto digital marketing agency Organic Inc., says marketers grappling with the potential of social networking need to make a major leap of faith. "There's a big fear that my customers may say negative things about the brand, and marketers have traditionally been focused on controlling the conversations," she says. "Now, it's not about controlling but facilitating. We know consumers are already having those conversations. It's the marketers' role to make the stories more interesting."
Ms. Carr finds the Forrester model interesting — especially in what it reveals about the Web consumer. More than half don't engage in social networking, she points out, and only one-third read blogs or post videos. "That's still a small number," she says. "There's been a lot of hype about [social computing], but many consumers aren't there yet. Marketers have to embrace not just appealing to consumers at top of ladder but appealing to the bottom."ƒo
Special to The Globe and Mail
