Social Strategy and the Conversionalists
The book Groundswell was enlighting, how to create Social strategies and so on. It was an eye-opener for many to understand how Social Media can be applied and intertwined in marketing efforts.
One of their tools is the Social Technographics, which classifies how people use social technologies.
Forrester has announced an upgrade in the classification of their Social Technographics ladder, they added the Conversionalists to it.
It’s good to see the enhancement of the ladder, because it shows the evolution of the usage of social technologies.
Dynamics as less perceived risk, adoption, diffusion amongst their circle of people, social technologies upgrades and so on, make the Conversionalists a new and present group. This doesn’t mean that status updating didn’t happen before, but networks and interoperability of networks have made it so much easier for people to inform their connections on what they’re doing.
The Social Technographics ladder is an important tool in social strategy creation.
First of all it let you create a profile of your customer base, it will prevent the creator of deploying tactics on networks where your customer base is not present, or with the wrong activities.
At the right of the ladder you’ll see the activities per group, these have to be tuned in with the marketing campaigns you’re going to execute.
On a wider scope, you’re able to segment the audience appropriately which will increase the relevancy, quality and successes of strategies.
What does this mean for social media plans?
Microblogging or real-time updating has become an important way for people to interact with and inform their networks. It also shows that people are becoming hyperconnective, a constant flow of short messages which are bounced back and forward between people and objects (read The Synaptic Web and the Flux of Information for the impact of the connections) to create an information infrastructure for private and business purposes.
Your target audience might have reached a critical mass to seriously investigate the opportunities of your Conversionalists, how to reach them and most importantly, how to empower them to create word-of-mouth enthausiasts. C2C (consumer to consumer) communication is a daily activity.
Your brand is what customers think the brand is, it’s in their hand, and the simplicity of status updates offers lots of opportunities to tap into this vast resource.
The challenge though, which as a community needs to be looked at, is how we can make sure that users won’t have a constant information overload?
An effect for this example is that your current customer base and potentials don’t read your content as you’re not the only one asking for the consumers’ attention.
Another effect is that the content which is communicated has to be relevant (be it in time and network), here the Social Technographics ladder proofs its importancy. It’s better to create small vertical campaigns which reach smaller amounts of quality people. It might cost more (in time), but you’re assured of a better long term effect and word-of-mouth.
Like the Social Technographics ladder is being updated in reaction to the differing usage of the Web, the next phase is how to cope with all the fragmented information, both from the customer and business point of view.
Technology-wise, opportunities lie ahead to find the much needed solution.
What’s your first reaction?
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Yes, there appears to be a lot of folks joining / using Social Networking. I am fairly new to its usage. There is a lot of personal networks being built – for personal use; also appears a lot of folks want to communicate with certain groups of people? A fair amount of the people using LinkedIn believe it will help increase their opportunities to locate employment. But from what I have read in other trade magazines corporate management (54%)has not accepted the use of Social Media for that purpose; they restrict access while on the job. I have noticed though that recruiters make use of what they can locate on Social Media to veiw a person’s published profile. And then we have those people who just want to be followed but their objectives aren’t clear and they consistently change direction. In conclusion, the Social Networking / Media is being used very widely but the validity of it for some uses is not very clear. As your ladder displays it has a wide varitey of uses for many people. Where do we go from here with Social Media Networking?
@ Catherine
The non-validation adds noise, increases quantity, because of the noise the message is not coming through.
This polutes even more the social sphere and information streams.
There is still a learning-curve and change ahead of us.
Nice post. There are some ways to grow your business and at the same time to connect with your customers. I have discussed it in detail.