Forrester adds Conversationalists to the Social Media Ladder

The role for the CMO in Social

Forrester Analyst Mary Beth Kemp, has posted on her blog the graphic below outlining ways CMOs can be leading the integration of social across an entire organisation.

The role for the CMO in social

Following from the graphic I posted earlier in the week, I thought this was an excellent tool to break down the complex area of social into bite size chunks that are understandable and actionable.

It is worth noting that Mary points out in her post that whilst the CMO should be ultimately responsible for driving social, activity should be split across the entire organisation, which I couldn’t agree with more.

The only problem for me with this graphic, as commenters pointed out in my last post, is that this only looks at social from an external marketing point of view. Of course I understand that this has been created with CMOs in mind, but there is enormous benefit for using social from an internal point of view as well. Your employees can be amazing external advocates for your organisation if they are happy and given the right education.

Thus the addition I would make is an internal comms component. I think this would fall in the embrace section and should be in the form of an internal only community for discussion and education. Do you agree?

Forrester adds Conversationalists to the Social Media Ladder

Forrester has updated its social media ladder, part of its ongoing Technographics research series, to include the new group Conversationalists.

According to Forrester, commenting on North American only data:

They’re one-third of the online population. They’re 56% female. If you imagine that they’re just youngsters, you’re wrong: 70% are 30 or older. Their household incomes are about $2,100 above the average online consumer, but their level of engagement is sky-high.

Forrester released its latest APAC region report this month – focussed this time on India. The report does not include the conversationalist group, but I expect we will see this appearing in reports moving forward.

The Forrester Technographics report and particularly the social media ladder is an invaluable tool for providing an overview of the different ways people engage with content online and I use it a lot during client education, especially because it has such rich APAC region data.

If presenting this one thing to remember is that the groups are not mutually exclusive – i.e. a person can be a member of more than one group. I also find it handy to work my way up the ladder taking the audience on a journey of increasing engagement groups.

UPDATE

I came across the graph below after publishing this post. It is an interesting graph that shows movement between the different groups on the social media ladder over a period of three years. Again this is US only data: