Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators and Inactives

Here's a most interesting segmentation according to people's degree of participation in social technology.

Forrester's Social Technographics classifies consumers into six overlapping levels of participation.

It's refreshing to read this from Forrester:

Companies often approach Social Computing as a list of technologies to be deployed as needed — a blog here, a community there — to achieve a marketing goal. But a more coherent 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.

Here's the tool to build various profiles by country. I was hoping for data from Quebec... Too bad Canada isn't even listed. Click on the pulsing 'build profile now'.

Comments

[Paul]

When I was at a Canadian company in the marketing department, Forrester cut the data to reflect the current customer base (which could be reflective of the overall Canadian market or at least Ontario). Surprisingly, the market lagged behind the US numbers in terms of the amount of creators and we had more inactives. Surprising because of the internet penetration and the vigor in which we embrace sites like facebook.

You are correct in your assessment - companies can't just think of the technology but the current gaps they are filling and what the unmet demand is. Social technologies need to address people on all parts of the ladder so that even if someone is not a posting maniac - there is still a positive experience for them.