One of the ultra-cool things about working in the online landscape is that you can identify your audience and segment them into groups based around actions and how they interact with your organization.
Forrester calls this the “participation ladder” – a metaphor that is absolutely perfect as marketing’s goal in the online landscape is to create more and more fully engaged users. Moving users up the participation ladder.
I’m almost positive I’ve posted this image before (I’ve certainly used it in presentations, 101s and new business pitches) but here is is again:
This is a generic ladder, showing you the technographic make-up of certain audiences so marketers can best apply tactics to their online strategy and maximize their results but the same can be done by businesses for their user base.
The reason I’m posting this (again) is that the Groundswell blog and technographic tool now includes CANADIAN DATA! Input your target audience and see how it shapes up in terms of online use.
Check it out. Eh.
**UPDATE** Looks that I was prematurely celebrating the Canadian data. Sean Moffitt says that it
“does fly in the face of a wealth of historical stats that suggest Canadians are more socially media savvy than most”
In stark contrast, Joe Boughner says, in a comment to this very blog post, that the data is actually way below the levels his won experience and research tells him.
I would hazard a guess that the Forrester research suffers from self-identifiers and early adopters having an undue affect on the data.
It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.
Ed Lee's Blogging Me Blogging You | @edlee 
What a fantastic, fantastic resource. Thanks for the link, Ed.
The only caution I would throw out, I guess, is based on my experience. My target audience is in the younger end of the scale, for the most part, but our own polling shows that our rates at the high end of the ladder are WAY below what Groundswell suggests they should be. Granted, we have a very specialized audience and Groundswell’s numbers are generic (age and gender are the only variables) but anyone using this data should keep that in mind.
[…] Ed Lee and Sean Moffitt (among others, I’m sure) have pointed out, there’s a host of other […]
I could buy that we are below the U.S. on a number of different strata on the ladder…i.e. critics…peace, order and good government may be alive in our social networking streaks vs. Live Free or Die stateside…
Given previous international data I’ve seen that puts Canada at the front of the pack, I can’t buy we’re so inactive and spectatorial unless a sea change has happened in the last year. Sample size may have a bearing on Forrester’s numbers, but it is an interesting one – perhaps something for my Marketing Week panel to figure out.
[…] por Jacob Nielsen, estudios similares relacionados con la curva de Zipf o la escalera de participación de Forrester. Por no hablar de bots o seguidores falsos comprados. Por lo tanto, no podemos concluir que el […]