Winning in a world transformed by social technologies--GROUNDSWELL

 Reflections 1 (Chapter1-4)

What is the groundswell?  The groundswell is ”A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations”.

 You might remember that our book mentioned a particular website called BzzAgent, which discussed a new marketing component used in social media. The authors Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff  explained how to understand, interact ,and  build  trust with an audience and also how to protect brands and integrate social media into existing marketing plans.  

What we call the “social technics profile” is a  key concept in groundswell. This is basically an assessment of the customer and the type of social activities in which they participate.  The  Video call 119- Apps on Google play models customer involvement using the POST method which consists of 4 elements: P for People, O for Objective, S for Strategy, and T for Technology.  By measuring public response and with more discussions and debates, we can collect more "objective" opinions to determine the APP's success.  

Developed by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, the social media profile uses demographics like age, location, and gender to group social media users into personas based on their amount of activity. These personas are similar to demographics and psychographics but are strictly based off of technology behaviors.

This graphic illustrates the success of the Video 119 APP.

According to the authors the social media profiles are as follows:

Creators

The creators are the most active participants on the Internet. They are constantly creating blog(post)s, websites, videos, audio or other content.  It is the fastest growing section of the ladder.

Conversationalists

This group is also creating, but only to facilitate communication and dialogues. They want to express themselves through status updates relating to recognition or trying to start a conversation or discussion regarding a chosen topic.

Critics

The critics are the opposite of the conversationalists. This group responds to status updates, blogs, websites, news, forums, products and services. For creators and conversationalists, this group is an essential one to maintain online interaction.

Creators, Conversationalists, and Critics tend to overlap across the social media Technographic ladder.

Collectors

The collectors use online resources to absorb lots of information, or to express their preferences.  

Joiners 

The joiners are present at Social Media websites to maintain their own profile and their relationship circle. They also absorb information to upgrade their own knowledge, but not to the same extent as the collectors.

Spectators 

The spectators are just viewing from a distance. They are getting information, but are using it only for increasing knowledge about topics, friends, celebrities, etc. There is no active participation. This group feels no need to get actively involved in creating.

This is the  largest group on the Social Technographics Ladder at nearly 70%

Inactives

The inactives are not present on Social Media. Or they may be present but aren’t doing anything at all.  With 17%, this is the  smallest group on the Social Technographics Ladder.

The  objective is to gather customer from the ladder.  The five ways to gather data are  listening, talking, energizing, supporting, and embracing.  In fact, these five objectives are linked to the familiar business functions in a company.  When the marketing strategy utilizes these objectives to gather information, the outcome is expected to be more effective.