Page 275 - Foundations of Marketing

242 Part 3 | Customer Behavior and E-Marketing

Table 9.2 Social Technographics

Creators Publish a blog
Publish personal webpages
Upload original video
Upload original audio/music
Write articles or stories and post them

Conversationalists Update status on social networking sites
Post updates on Twitter

Critics Post ratings/reviews of products
Comment on someone else’s blog
Contribute to online forums
Contribute to/edit articles in a wiki
Collectors Use RSS feeds
Add tags to webpages or photos
“Vote” for websites online

Joiners Maintain profi le on a social networking site
Visit social networking sites
Spectators Read blogs
Watch video from other users
Listen to podcasts
Read online forums
Read customer ratings/reviews

Inactives None of the activities
Source: Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, Groundswell (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2008), 43 ; “Forrester Unveils
New Segment of Social Technographics—The Conversationalists,” 360 Digital Connections, January 21, 2010, http://
blog.360i.com/social-media/forrester-new-segment-social-technographics-conversationalists (accessed July 8, 2012).

Collectors are perhaps the least recognized group of the seven. Collectors gather informa-
tion and organize content generated by critics and creators. The growing popularity of this
segment has led to the creation of bulletin board and bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, reddit,
and even Pinterest for photos. Want to know the top 10 stories according to online consumers?
Collectors gather this type of information and post their findings to social networking sites
like reddit, where users vote on the sites they like the best. Collectors usually constitute a
smaller part of the online population than the other groups; however, they can still have a sig-
nificant impact on marketing activities. Because collectors are active members in the online
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community, a company story or site that catches the eye of a collector is likely to be posted and
discussed on collector sites and made available to other online users looking for information.
Another Technographic segment, known as joiners , is growing dramatically. Anyone who
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becomes a member of Twitter, Facebook, or other social networking sites is a joiner. It is
not unusual for consumers to be members of several social networking sites at once. Joiners
participate in these sites to connect and network with other users, but, as previously discussed,
marketers can take significant advantage of these sites to connect with consumers and form
customer relationships.
The last two segments are classified as spectators and inactives . Inactives are online users
who do not participate in any digital online media, but as more and more people begin to use
computers as a resource, this number is dwindling. Spectators are the largest group in most
countries, and it is not hard to see why. Spectators are those consumers who read what other
consumers produce but do not create any content themselves.
Marketers need to consider if their online customers are creating, conversing, rating, col-
lecting, joining, or simply reading online materials. As with traditional marketing efforts,

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