Social Marketing….Where’s Your Consumer on the Ladder?

Posted on | April 1, 2008 |

Last night I went to a book launch party for Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies written by two Forrester vets - Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff.

The book aims to help companies market to people using online social technologies: blogs, social networking sites, YouTube, podcasts etc. etc.

Like the Tipping Point – Groundswell breaks consumers up into categories of influence. They call this Social Technographics (see these slides for further description) and identify six levels of participation with social media. The idea is to look at why and how consumers approach social technologies – not just the adoption of individual technologies. If you plan to use social social technologies first you need to identify your customers’ Social Technographics profile, and then create a social strategy based on that profile.

Charlene and Josh use the metaphor of a ladder to further explain the six different categories of participation. The rungs at the higher end of the ladder indicating a higher level of participation. The value of Social Technographics comes when it’s used by companies to create their social strategies. It helps you get key insights into your consumers’ motivation and helps inform which social strategies to deploy first. The goal being to encourage users to “climb up” from being Spectators to becoming more engaged.

As it is in the real (non-cyber) world – not everyone is cut out to be a Creator; nor is everyone inclined to put their life online for social networking. Before we run out to spend big bucks on developing our own social networking tools or on widgets to set loose on social networks we need to understand where our desired consumer is on the ladder.

Lucky for us – Josh and Charlene offer up a free tool to analyze the engagement of different audiences. Go here and plug in the age range, country of residence and gender of your desired audience.

As you can see below – women may not necessarily be in the sweet spot for active social network marketing.

Online shopping expert, Michelle Madhok, is the CEO of White Cat Media LLC publisher of SheFinds.com and MomFinds.com, sites that help busy women shop online.

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