Social Technographics: Interesting But I Don't Buy The Ladder

In my last post, I rhetorically asked where I would get my statistics in the event of a physiological catastrophe. The answer came to me in an overnight email: Forrester. They were offering review copies of their Social Technographics study to bloggers & they kindly sent me one on request.

This is based on two surveys (1 x adults, 1 x kids) carried out in late 2006 among US consumers. There is much crunching of data but the centrepiece of the report is Charlene's Ladder:

It's a brave position but I have a problem with Charlene's Ladder. It perpetuates a series of myths about how people actually use social media & the act of creativity in general. Creators are at the top of the ladder. Spectators are at the bottom. And those people interacting with stuff & others somewhere in the middle. As Jack Vinson notes people do not neatly fall into these categories. Like Jack, I occupy each of the six roles simultaneously, depending on context. Now the report as much as admits this but then it takes a wrong turn. Those activities higher up the ladder do not indicate higher levels of participation but rather different participation activities. People are doing qualitatively different things with each of those tools rather than quantitatively more of the same thing. In their own ways, the critics & joiners are being just as creative & participative as the creators - they just aren't making stuff under their own name. Whether those who engage mainly in critic & joiner activities go up the ladder is not a foregone conclusion. I await with interest a longitudinal study that will prove that. In our society we tend to valorise creative individuals at the expense of others. Where as the truth is, everyone is creative. Not in an Oscar-winning film way but in all sorts of ways. That's where the power of social computing lies - in finally making visible the collaborative nature of creativity.

That said, I agree with some of the recommendations at the end of the report - esp. the point "Create Multiple Participation Points". If you want to interact with your customers/consumers - and more importantly if you want them to interact with each other - give them plenty of different ways of doing that & see what happens. I think trying to understand the social technographic profile of your audience has some value but is ultimately a waste of time. Why analyse when you can see for yourself by looking at what people do?