Let’s “social-technograph” our target customers!

A very practical interactive tool from Forrester Research: analyze a population (your target customers) “social technograhics” profile according to AGE group, GENDER, and COUNTRY. In brief, you’ll get a classification of people according to how they use social technologies (how active in the “critic” domain is my target population? how do men differ from women? etc.)

Unfortunately, WordPress is giving me trouble embedding the tool (iframe), so you need to visit the Groundswell blog to use it! You’ll get there other useful information such as data source, etc..

Social Technology Adoption

In a recent study that my supervisor and I conducted at the University of British Columbia, we collected data on the ‘social’ profile of 200 North American (US+Canada) online shoppers. This gives the opportunity to compare our figures with the ones reported by Forrester in a 2009 in The growth of social technology adoption.

Interestingly, we noticed that online shoppers seem to be more ‘socially active’ than the average US online adults forming the sample surveyed by Forrester Research (it is also possible that this is the general adoption which grew a lot between their last study  – Q2 2008 – and ours  – June 2009).   In fact, they do everything (create, critic, collect, join social networks, and consumer user-generated content) more. Notice the greatest gap in terms of the percentage of joiners(which we have almost 35% more in our sample of online shoppers).

As a reminder, the groups include consumers participating in at least one
of the indicated activities at least monthly:

• Creator: Publish a blog, Publish your own Web pages, Upload video you created, Upload audio/music you created, Write articles or stories and post them.
• Critics: Post ratings/reviews of products or services, Comment on someone. else’s blog, Contribute to online forums,  Contribute to/edit articles in a wiki.
• Collectors: Use RSS feeds, “Vote” for Web sites online, Add “tags” to Web pages or photos.
• Joiners: Maintain profile on a social networking site, Visit social networking sites
• Spectators:  Read blogs, Listen to podcasts , Watch video from other users, Read online forums, Read customer ratings/reviews
• Inactive: None of the above

Convergence 2009

Last monday, I attended Convergence, an event organized by CossetteWest to gather various industry actors and discuss new issues and opportunities in the realm of digital marketing and communications. Here is a summary of my favorite moments!

• The day started with (the ultra-famous) David Plouffe, Manager of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. M. Plouffe presented the pillars of his Web strategy (raising donation, letting people organize, broadcast messages) and discussed how technologies were used to better reach specific targets and engage people. (note that my Dean from Sauder Business School, Daniel F. Muzyka, introduced the presentation!)
• The Twitter effect / microblogging session:  panelists (from Starbucks, Vancouver Opera, and NowPublic) discussed how they were using this communication channel in their organizations to engage in mass or one-to-one communication with their customers (Starbucks has….177 000 followers on Twitter!!). It seems that people are experiencing these new applications but nobody could yet seriously discuss the ROI of “twittering”. But people are certainly using this channel to monitor what is being said about their brands (and eventually take care of a customer’s complaint or negative comment), and disseminate information to their followers. 
• The digital branding panel: discussants were from from Lululemon, Natures Path, and Mountain Equipment Coop. These guys let their customers talk to each others about their products and the values they embedd. Little by little they are integrating some social computing kind of features on their sites (e.g., reviews and ratings on Nature Path, user generated videos on MEC, and blogs on Lulumemon), and adjusting their design tactics.
• Conclusion: it was good to hear these “case studies” as it seems that (1) people are willing to play the game and invest in social media, and (2) they are doing so a little but by ‘trial and error” so there is still MUCH to do in terms of research or creation to have technologies enhance  marketing and communication!