Social Technographics: Conversationalists get onto the ladder

by Josh Bernoff

Two and a half years ago, Charlene Li and I introduced Social Technographics, a way to analyze your market's social technology behavior. Social Technographics was carefully constructed, not as a segmentation, but as a profile (that is, the groups overlap). That's because the actual data told me that people participate in multiple behaviors, and not everyone at a higher level on the ladder actually does everything in the lower rungs.

Well, it worked. Despite the rapid pace of technology adoption, the rungs on the ladder have shown steady growth, with some (like Joiners) growing faster than others (like Creators). We have analyzed data for 13 countries, for business buyers, and even for voters. My colleagues and I have done profiles for over a hundred clients, profiling Walmart shoppers, non-profit donors, and doctors.

In all that time, only one thing has been bugging me: there was no place for Twitter.

We fixed that today.

As you can see from the graphic, we added a new rung, "Conversationalists". Conversationalists reflects two changes. First, it includes not just Twitter members, but also people who update social network status to converse (since this activity in Facebook is actually more prevalent than tweeting). And second, we include only people who update at least weekly, since anything less than this isn't much of a conversation.

Conversationalists intrigue me. They're 56% female, more than any other group in the ladder. While they're among the youngest of the groups, 70% are still 30 and up.

The data from this survey continues the trends from the last two years -- Spectators are maxing out at around 70%, Joiners are still growing rapidly, and Creators are still growing slowly.

As in any social environment, people have found lots of uses for this data, some of which make sense to me, and some which don't. Here are three ways you can use it:

1. Convince your boss this stuff is for real, and that if you haven't jumped on it, you're late.

2. Profile your customer base, and see what they're ready for, before planning a project to reach out to them. (After all, People is the first step in the POST process.)

3. Segment your audience; build different strategies for different segments. (Social is so prevalent now that a single approach for your company is probably too broad.)

How will you use it?

Note: For Forrester clients, full access to the research is available here.

New Data: Canadians embrace social technology

by Josh Bernoff

Since we published our 2009 Social Technographics Profile update, Canadians have been hounding me. Why did we leave Canada out? Simply because the Canadian data comes from a different survey, which was not completed in time.

Thanks for waiting, Canada.

We just published Nate Elliott's 2009 Social Technographics Profile of Canadian consumers (full text and data available to clients). Here's what we found:

• With 79% of online Canadians connecting with social content in some way at least once a month, Canadians are among the most active consumers in any country we survey.
• Well over half of online Canadians connect with social networks.
• As in other countries, young Canadians use social technology more than older Canadians, but Gen X Canadians are still very active, with 85% using some form of social technology at least monthly.

Based on this level of activity, Canadian companies like the Vancity credit union, TELUS Mobility, and Molson have leveraged social applications from Facebook to YouTube to blogs to connect with consumers. Not to mention the NHL, which has great success with fan tweetups; it isn't a Canadian organization but it might as well be given the enthusiastic response from Canadian tweeters.

As we've seen in other countries with high levels of participation and relatively smaller populations, Canada will continue to be fertile ground for people to connect socially. Already, Canadian social-media agencies like Wunderman's Blast Radius and Currency Marketing are creating impressive applications.

By the way, if you want to see how Canadians stack up with online consumers in other countries, see our Social Technographics Profile Tool.

Note: Nate's own post on this includes some interesting data about Canadians' profiles based on political party.

In Japan and Korea, consumers embrace social technology faster than marketers

By Josh Bernoff

I'm just back from three and a half days in Tokyo and two and a half in Seoul. I am always struck, like all travelers, by both what’s similar in other cultures and what’s different. I want to be careful about making generalizations from such a short exposure, but I’d also like to share some impressions with those who might want to look at Asia through my eyes. If you’re Japanese or Korean, or feel you have a good understanding of what’s really going on those countries, I’d welcome your perspective.

I spent my days in Japan speaking with reporters, working with companies, and giving a speech at Ad:Tech’s inaugural Tokyo event (1000 people) and an smaller executive event for Google Japan. As you can see from our recently published data, Japanese consumers are active in social networks and in creating social content, so I expected to see a lot of activity among Japanese companies as well. But in truth, I saw very little corporate activity on these networks. (If you have examples, by all means share them, because I have very few.)

From talking to executives and the 30 or so social media enthusiasts who braved a typhoon to meet me at a Tweetup, I have a theory on why the level of activity is low. Japanese companies are famous for their tendency to look for strong agreement before moving forward, but social applications generate a fair amount of discomfort for companies. In other words, social activity by companies includes risk, and the individuals in Japan who are comfortable with these risks – mostly younger individuals – don’t have much power.

One exception came from Coca-Cola Japan's Shoko Suzuki, a senior marketer who spoke along with me at the Google Japan event. Suzuki-san’s description of Coca-Cola’s online and mobile activities in Japan demonstrated a willingness to try new interactive marketing strategies. Some at the Tweetup suggested that challenges from companies based outside Japan, like Coca-Cola, may get the Japanese marketing executives moving in the social world.

In Seoul, my Forrester colleagues crammed my two days in Seoul with meetings, including my first-ever Groundswell workshop with a non-English speaking group. I was delighted to see such innovation from this Korean company, whose staff included some enthusiastic young women (I saw far more women in positions of influence in Korea than in Japan). These workers embraced the concepts of the groundswell and generated some great ideas – just as I have seen in many workshops in the US and the UK. In my meetings with other Korean companies I saw a real willingness to embrace social applications for business goals, and in my speech to 300 mostly young and enthusiastic Koreans I got some excellent questions about social technologies in non-profits, sponsored conversation, and how to hire social media experts.

Why the embrace of these ideas in South Korea? This nation has the highest rates of broadband penetration anywhere in the world, and an extremely active online population, as you can see from our profile of online South Koreans. The CyWorld online community is the dominant social network, and Naver, the leading Korean search engine, has social elements. I saw many Korean businesspeople willing to challenge authority, and open to taking risks. (Many also speak good English – one young guy said “like” every other sentence; and sure enough, he had spent a couple years in high school in California.) Even in a breakfast talk to a more senior bunch of Korean executives, I saw heads nodding and fielded some excellent questions that indicated real interest.

One other trend I saw in both places: people are discouraged from using the Internet for personal purposes at work. And job-hopping isn’t common, especially in Japan. As a result, work-based social activities (like LinkedIn) just haven’t caught on in these locations. In talking to companies about B2B social networking, I got looks that revealed that they wondered if I came from another planet. This aspect of social applications, at least, is going to get started faster in the US and Europe.

At the last minute, I was invited to spend part of Saturday morning with Kim Hee-Jung the President and CEO of KISA, the Korean government agency in charge of promoting and protecting its Internet infrastructure. I was once again impressed that a woman in her thirties, clearly bright and inquisitive, had risen to such an important government position. As we spoke about social networks, mobile services, and IT in Korea, I extended my favorable impression. Korea’s internet experience is not the same one we have in the US – for one thing, large sites have to verify people’s real names to allow them to participate – but it continues to evolve in a social and mobile direction that may presage the types of changes we’ll see in the US.

The continued high levels of social participation in this part of the world tell me that corporate social innovation won’t be far behind. Even in Japan, once executives see how it’s done, they’re likely to move in a bunch. For companies based elsewhere that do business in Asia, I’d recommend trying new social technology projects in Korea or Japan, where the social world isn’t quite a crowded with corporate social applications ads it’s getting in America. You just might learn something that’s not available anywhere else.

Social technology growth marches on in 2009, led by social network sites

by Josh Bernoff

We just published our third annual Social Technographics Profile in a document called "The Broad Reach of Social Technologies" . The author is Sean Corcoran, with help from out data expert Cynthia Pflaum. The data across North America, Europe, and Asia will be available later today.is now available.

Starting with the book "Groundswell" and continuing now for three years running, we've analyzed consumers' participation in social technologies around the world with a tool called the "Social Technographics Profile." The profile puts online people into overlapping groups based on their participation (at least once a month) in the behaviors shown in the ladder. We've kept the ladder categories consistent to allow us to make comparisons year-to-year, across ages and genders, and across geographies. This provides something that's often sorely lacking in analysis of online social phenomena: perspective.

The headline: in 2009, more than four out of five online Americans are active in either creating, participating in, or reading some form of social content at least once a month. In a bit more detail:

• In the US, social technology Creators and Collectors grew slowly, and Critics didn't grow at all. Creator activity appeals only to those who like to create or upload content, and regardless of the ease of blogging and YouTube uploading, this doesn't apply to everybody. If you believe in the future that everybody will be creating or organizing content, we disagree -- it's a matter of temperament, not technology. As for Critics, those who react to content, this group hasn't grown at all. Looking deeper into the data, this is a result of a small but actual decrease in the number of people contributing to discussion forums. Why? Probably because much of this activity has been sucked into social network sites like Facebook.

• At the same time, Joiner activity exploded and Spectators became nearly universal. The explosion in Joiners from 35% to 51% of online Americans reflects the appeal of Facebook, as both press coverage and invitations from friends suck more of us into social networks. Meanwhile, Spectators -- those consuming social content -- reached all the way to 73% of online Americans, which should end any remaining skepticism about whether this social thing is real. Soon, with the level of social content being put out there, it will be virtually impossible for an online consumer not to be a Spectator. Marketers, if you're not doing social technology applications now, you're officially behind. We expect a wave of Web site reorgs and redesigns to include social activity.

Looking at the data by age, we now see that participation among those under 35 is nearly universal (less than 10% Inactives) and even among those 55 and over, about two-thirds are participating. The trend is clear, soon, if you're online, you'll almost certainly be consuming social technologies.

We are now releasing international data at the same time as this US data. A few highlights: Europeans continue to adopt these technologies more slowly than in the US, with about 40% Inactives in the countries where we do surveys. The Netherlands and Sweden have the most participation, Italy has the most Creators, and social networks are most popular in the UK. For more details see the summary of Rebecca Jennings' report on social technologies in Europe.

Asian social participation is typically as high as or higher than in the US. For example South Korea, where I'm going next week, has only 9% Inactives and 48% Joiners, as a result of the popular CyWorld social network site.

The international data by country, age, and gender is here. will be available later today. You can even put the data on your own site -- we've made it embeddable. In my travels, I've found that marketers have a variety of attitudes about social technologies, ranging from "it's obvious that they're growing" to "it's a flash in the pan". The point of data like this is to provide a real, solid, objective basis for planning and discussion that goes beyond personal experience. No matter who you market to, and in what country, you need to know what your customers are doing. These surveys can help you take that first step+.

Added: Since the embeddable widget with the new data is now available, I've posted it below:

New research: B2B buyers have very high social participation

by Josh Bernoff

Today we are publishing our research on one of the most active groups of people I've ever seen when it comes to social participation -- buyers in the business-to-business sector.

This research report, "The Social Technographics of Business Buyers," was published by Laura Ramos and Oliver Young in our Technology Industry/B2B group; you can access the full report if you're a Forrester client. Or anyone can register to hear the replay of Laura's Webinar on the topic.

Just as we survey consumers, Forrester also surveys business buyers. We use the POST method and the same Social Technographics Profile to review buyers' behavior -- in this case it's over 1200 buyers in American and European countries. But the difference here is, we can ask, not just how people participate in these social technologies, but whether they use them to make buying decisions.

The results were startling, to say the least.

Some highlights from this research (start by looking at the right two columns):

• 91% of these technology decision-makers were Spectators -- the highest number I've ever seen in a Social Technographics Profile. This means you can count on the fact that your buyers are reading blogs, watching user generated video, and participating in other social media. Note that 69% of them said they were using this technology for business purposes.
• Only 5% are non-participants (Inactives).
• 55% of these decision-makers were in social networks (Joiners) -- despite as mature businesspeople and not college students, you'd think they'd be participating a lot less.
• 43% are creating media (blogs, uploading videos or articles, etc.) and 58% are Critics, reacting to content they see in social formats. Again the numbers are very high compared to other groups we've surveyed, and again the level of participation for business purposes is also very high.

What does this mean for you? If you're a B2B marketer and you're not using social technologies in your marketing, it means you're late. We've seen a lot of excellent activity here from the likes of Dell and National Instruments (both won Forrester Groundswell awards) but a lot of the blogs, communities, and other social outreach from business to business companies is less than mature, to say the least. This is your chance to stand out. Take this report and show it to your boss to convince her that it's time to get started.

The report includes some good recommendations for B2B buyers, including the following:

• Note that buyers use social technology but don't rate it highly in terms of its influence on their buying decisions. This, despite the fact that count on peers' opinions to make decisions. I think this reflects that people haven't gotten used to this sort of information as a key input in buying decisions. This will change, especially as better applications come on line.
• Social applications should be integrated into other marketing. For example, National Instruments makes technical content from its customer community central in its marketing activity -- this is a model other B2B sellers should follow.
• Reach out to people by role -- people with the same job description form natural communities. This is a technique IBM SOA marketer Sandy Carter has described in her book "The Language of Marketing 2.0"

There's a lot more in the report, and you can also find B2B social insights from thinkers like Paul Gillin and Chris Herbert. Given the high degree of participation, I think B2B marketers will continue to lead in social media marketing.

Reconciling Social Technographics and 90-9-1

by Josh Bernoff

Forrester’s Social Technographics surveys show that when it comes to social content 21% of online US consumers are Creators, 37% are Critics (those who react to content created by others), and 69% are Spectators.

The 90-9-1 principle, recently publicized by Community Guy Jake McKee at 90-9-1.com, says that in a community, the rule of thumb is that 90% of visitors only view the content, 9% only comment or react to it, and 1% create it.

 This confuses people, and I often get questions about who’s right. In fact, there is no contradiction between these two statements. Let’s examine why.

First of all, the 90-9-1 principle applies to a single site or community. Let’s suppose we are talking about tivocommunity.com, for example. 90-9-1 says that 1% of its members create content. But our surveys might detect a TiVo community member who just reads the Tivo posts, but who is an enthusiastic Barack Obama supporter at myBO.com. Forrester's surveys would call her a Creator. But with regard to tivocommunity.com, Jake’s rule says she’s in the 90% or lurkers. No contradiction, it just depends on whether you're looking at a single site or across all sites. Since Creators (in the Forrester sense) include people who create content at any site, they add up to a lot more than 1%

Second, our groups are designed to overlap. Since we also identify Collectors (who organize content) and Joiners (who join social networks), there’s no strict hierarchy. Some Joiners are Creators, some Creators are Joiners, but neither group is a subset of the other. (When creating Social Technographics I attempted to create a hierarchy of behaviors, but carefully examining the data convinced me that was a mistake.) So we allow our categories to overlap. 90-9-1, which examines fewer activities, can accommodate mutually exclusive categories.

Third, 90-9-1 is a rule of thumb. For example, according to 90-9-1.com, only 0.16% of YouTube visitors upload content, far less than 1%. A community of Webmasters will have a lot more contributors than a community of senior citizens. Our surveys are actual data independent of site-to-site variation. (So I don’t get to create a nice neat rule, while Jake can.)

What’s it mean? It means that 90-9-1 is a good rule of thumb for sites, while Social Technographics is a good way to look at populations. And it also means that you should check the Social Technographics Profile of your customers first, to see how many of them are likely to contribute if you put them in a community. 

Got it? Looking forward to your comments.

New 2008 Social Technographics data reveals rapid growth in adoption

by Josh Bernoff

Data is my secret weapon.

Every time I visit a company, we bring data we’ve collected about the social behaviors of their customers, structured according to the Social Technographics Ladder we introduced last year, a technique we rang the changes on in chapter 3 of Groundswell.

 

When I go to Vanguard, I show them the profile of their customers – and their competitors'. I went to a company that makes replacement hip joints – I showed them the profile of people with arthritis. I just came back from Brussels, where I showed a bunch of direct marketers how Europeans participate – and how many people who resist direct marketing still embrace social technologies. We’ve published lots of this data right here on the blog, including data on voters. Data settles the pointless “everybody does this/nobody does this” arguments and allows people to invest in the appropriate technologies for their customers.

But data gets old, especially in the rapidly changing social world. Time for an update. Today, we’ve released our 2008 data from around the world. Go ahead and play around with it, free, at our just-updated Social Technographics Profile tool page. We’ve got data from 11 countries around the world, by age and gender. (For the Canadians who’ve been bugging me since Groundswell came out – yes, we now have Canadian data, too.) 

Forrester clients can see our complete analysis of the 2008 data in a document we just published, called The Growth Of Social Technology Adoption. (If you’re not a client, the link will just show you an executive summary.) I'll also be speaking on this topic at our 2008 Consumer Forum.

Looking at the US data, the big news in 2008 is that, not unexpectedly, social technology participation has grown rapidly. Inactives -- people untouched by social technologies -- have shriveled from 44% down to 25% of the online population. Spectators -- those who read, watch, or consumer social content -- have ballooned from 48% to 69%. If you think social technology is about to become a universal phenomenon, we just handed you a nice little bundle of evidence.

As you can see, there was also a nice healthy jump in Joiners (social network participants), Critics (those who react to social content they see), and especially Collectors (those who organize social content). None of these are quite as popular as being a Spectator, but I think there’s plenty of growth ahead for these groups. (If it’s bothering you that the numbers add up to more than 100%, remember that these groups overlap – this is not a segmentation.)

I find it just as interesting that the Creators group grew only slightly, from 18% to 21%. I have long suspected that there aren’t more people blogging, creating Web pages, or uploading video or audio, not because the technology gets in the way, but because they’re just not the kind of extroverts who want to talk about themselves or anything else online. I think this group will continue to grow much more slowly than the others. Interestingly, this kind of participation is far greater in some places like Korea and China.

As usual, the real story comes when you look behind the statistics. Where is the growth in consumption of online content coming from? From older people – the group my young colleagues who manage all this data call “middle-aged.” (Ouch!) Social activity is way up among 35-to-44 year-olds, especially when it comes to joining social networks and reading and reacting to content. Even among 45-to-54 year-olds, 68% are now Spectators, 24% are Joiners, and only 28% are Inactives.

Here’s what it means. It will soon be no more remarkable that your grandmother reads a blog than that she reads email. Social content is going mainstream. Social content ranks high on search engines because it changes so frequently and gets linked to more often, so more and more online adults are becoming exposed to it, accepting it, and embracing it. If you’re a marketer, no matter what group of consumers you’re targeting, this means you must pay attention to the social world online.

But the future of social applications online will not include contributions from everyone, because not everyone has the temperament to create content. Don’t count on all your customers to contribute, and don’t believe that what you see online is representative of your whole audience. The shy among your customers are reading this stuff, but most of them aren’t ready to contribute, and won’t be for a while.

This is the power of data – the power to see beyond the hype and see what’s really changing. I’d love to bring some to your company and start the conversation. 

Postscript: I’d be remiss if I didn’t give credit to the people who make this data collection possible (and excellent). Cynthia Pflaum is the secret force behind my data insights – she not only finds these tidbits that companies find so useful, she’s also my watchdog for maintaining consistency in our surveys worldwide. Reineke Reitsma is in charge our worldwide data collection and her support of this project (and her budget) make this possible. And Roxana Strohmenger for the second year assembled our worldwide data so we could put it into the profile tool. Thank you, colleagues.

Data chart of the week: forums, ratings, and reviews around the world

by Josh Bernoff

More data from around the world -- and from Chapter 2 of Groundswell.

As a companion to our data charts of social networks and blogs and user-generated video around the world, here's a look at forums, ratings, and reviews around the world.

Unlike our previous international data cuts, this one is far more likely to reflect cultural differences than the prevalence of specific sites in a country's home language. We again see the advanced participation of Japanese and Americans in discussion forum. Koreans participate a lot less -- any Koreans out there that can shed light on this?

As for ratings and reviews, more than one in five online consumers read them in the US, UK, Germany, and Japan. (Note that this includes only people who read them once a month or more -- there are doubtless a lot of less frequent readers of ratings.) Americans, Japanese, and Koreans are the most likely to write reviews -- Brits and the French have the lowest proportion of ratings readers who are writers as well.

These "Web 1.0" technologies are the mainstay of the groundswell. They're easy to use, easy to participate in, easy to benefit from. All they require is that you react to what's in front of you. That's why Critics are biggest of the active elements of the Social Technographics ladder -- and why I think they'll grow to include more and more online consumers every year, in every country in the world.

Data chart of the week: social networks around the world

by Josh Bernoff

There's a lot of speculation about social networks, and predictions usually go in one of two directions:

• This is growing and soon everybody will be on one (or more than one)
• This is a fad and even the college students will tire of it eventually.

(You could also call these the "Facebook is worth $20 Billion" and "Facebook is worth nothing" factions.)

To add fuel to the debate, this week's data chart, from Chapter 2 of Groundswell looks at participation in social networks around the world.

Important caveats on this data -- while these surveys were all taken with 6 months of each other 2007, the methodologies are not the same: US is an online survey, Europe is a mail survey, and Asia is a telephone survey. In each case, the base is all online consumers, and people were asked the question "do you visit a social networking site at least monthly?" or "how frequently do you visit a social networking site?" with examples from their own country. We count only those who visit at least monthly.

That said, this variation is fascinating, to me at least.

Does Korea have the highest participation because of CyWorld, or because Koreans love to connect?

Why are Germany, and especially France, so low? Is it something about the way French people behave online, or is there an opening for a great French social network (or the French version of an existing one, like Facebook)?

Charlene says that in the future, social networks will be like air, surrounding everything. If she's right, the very nature of this question will change.

I challenge you -- will the US become like Korea, and will France become like either one? What do you think?

Data chart of the week: social profiles for elements of a segmentation

by Josh Bernoff

So far, all of our Social Technographics Profile examples have used consumer behavior or attitude variables, like a comparison of car owners by brand or an analysis of Alpha moms. But we're finding, increasingly, that clients don't want to hear about the profile of the customers. They want to hear about a profile of their customer segments.

Most companies that sell to large numbers of people have segmented their customers. A retailer analyzes its shoppers and finds some come for convenience, some for price, and some for selection -- and some because their mom shopped there. Or an electronics manufacturer creates low-end easy-to-use products for the technology laggards and high-end sophisticated products for the early adopters.

Segmentation is smart if you use it to design products and marketing plans for different groups of customers. If you're growing a product line, it may be essential. Typically, a research project leads to customer insights, which leads to a segmentation, which leads to actions based on those segments. So when creating a social application for these segments, you need to ask -- which strategies apply to which customers?

Here's a good example. A large communications company had already segmented its customers and came to us with segment descriptions. Using the descriptions, we profiled three of the segments. The results are shown below. (The client's name and the descriptions of the segments are proprietary, I can't share them.)

What would you do if these were your customer segments?

Here's what we told the client.

First, the two segments shown here in blue are extremely active with social technologies -- some of the most active groups we've seen. We recommended creating groups within Facebook to engage them, building idea communities, and identifying and energizing customers by monitoring blogs and social networks. Failing to engage with these customers is a big mistake. Furthermore, although the company had identified two separate segments, we recommended using the same programs for both segments, since they have such similar profiles.

The third segment, shown in orange, features 61% Inactives and only 20% Joiners -- well below average. We recommended spending marketing money on this segment elsewhere, rather than on social programs, which would be difficult to get going with a profile like this.

One final note. Both in this project and another similar one for a beverage company, we found the companies had difficulty identifying their own segments! The first time this happened, I found it strange, but twice made me think it's a pattern. For any companies out there planning or implementing a segmentation, remember: you need some mechanism to identify who's in those segments. If you think segementation leads to insight and then you're done, you'll may find it frustrating (as we did) to take those segments further into a realm like targeting for social applications.