Social Media Now: Climbing the Social Ladder

The blogosphere is full of cynics. And there’s plenty of cynical response on the Net to Forrester’s report on adult social media behavior. The report, which is geared to helping marketers integrate social media into business strategies, proposes a “participation ladder” as a metaphor, with six rungs stepping up from “inactives” at the bottom to “creators” at the top.

Pramit Singh criticizes the report, and all off the meme-making blogosphere punditry, for over hyping recycled information:

If you look at the above graphic, do you see anything new? To me, this looks like they have taken Jason Calacanis’ observation about social networking/web 2.0, namely ‘80% consume, 19% comment, 1% contribute”, added up known observations taken by the Pew Research and voila!, a new report is born.

But there IS new and interesting information in the Forrester report. Most importantly Li and her colleagues have tried to slice online social behavior into narrower segments that the traditional ones of contributor, participant, and tagger. In doing so they challenge the conventional thinking about social segmentation most recently reiterated at Web 2.0 Expo last week by Bill Tacer, general manager of Hitwise, who said:

It’s not the 80-20 rule anymore. It’s 1-9-90.” Spread across the Web, generally 1 percent of visitors are creators and producers, 9 percent are “highly involved participators”,… and 90 percent are consumers or viewers.

Li splits the universe of social media participants into the following categories:

• Creators, who publish blogs, web pages, etc, comprise 13% of users
• Critics, who comment and review, comprise 19%
• Collectors, who tag and bookmark, comprise 15%
• Joiners, who uses social networking sites, comprise 19%
• Spectators, who passively engage with social media content, comprise 33%
• Inactives, who use the Net but not social media, comprise 52%

Obviously the user classes overlap since the percentages add up to well over 100%.
I’m not crazy about Forrester’s metaphor. The ladder is bad because it implies that users climb from the bottom to the top–that “spectating” is a gateway drug on the way to creating. This isn’t true. Also the ladder fails to convey the truth these strata are not discrete–creators are also joiners, for example.

And I would quibble with Forrester’s nomenclature. Collector is the wrong word for someone who shares tags and bookmarks since collectors typically acquire rare stuff and hold it close.

The study also comes up short when it examines the reasons for which people become engaged in social media, slicing those into only three categories–entertainment, career, and family–so broad as to be utterly useless.

But I applaud Forrester for trying to look at the universe of social media through a finer sieve than is typical and I’m particularly interested in a table that Li et al have complied about different behaviors in each of these categories according to age. The table reveals that 18-21 year olds are way more deeply involved in joining social networks than people a little older and those a little younger. Could social the MySpace/Facebook business have peaked with this demographic?

At Skype Journal Phil Wolff proposes an additional ladder, a Ladder of Disclosure–a way of thinking about social media behavior based on how much personal information participants are willing to reveal from live webcam living Twitter addicts at the top to folks off the grid at the bottom. It’s a very interesting way of thinking about the social media universe although Wolff has no survey data to work with. Wolff also notes that Forrester’s ladder misses the mobile Net and live communications systems like IM or Skype.

In other survey news, Liz Gannes at GigaOM reports on a survey that MySpace commissioned of its users, which found, perhaps self-servingly, that there is an exponential increase in brand awareness that comes from social networking campaigns.
Widget Peace: Terms of the armistice have not been announced but MySpace has lifted its ban on video links from photo and video hosting widget maker Photobucket.
Funding News: Mountainview-based Podbridge, a podcasting analytics firm, has raised $8.5 million in second round financing led by new investor Sutter Hill Ventures and joined by first round investors Mayfield Fund and Worldview Technology Partners.