Comparing Forrester’s social technographics to twitter

31May07

Last month I wrote about Forrester’s approach to social computing. To reiterate, Forrester classify people in 6 different ways depending upon how they use technology. These are:

1. Creators
2. Critics
3. Collectors
4. Joiners
5. Spectators
6. Inactives

What made me highlight this post again, was after reading Twitter’s take on this. They believe there are 4 types of twitter users:

High Influentials – e.g. Michael Arrington, Techcrunch (167 messages, 1931 followers)
An High Influential is a Twitter user who publishes only a limited number of messages and at the same time has a whole herd of followers. High Influentials don’t write much, but they are read by many people.

Twitter Stars – e.g. Robert Scoble, Tech Geek Blogger (1892 messages, 3861 followers)
A Twitter Star publishes many messages who are read by many followers. These Twitter users tend also to have many friends.

Lurkers – lots of them… maybe you?
A Lurker is a Twitter user who has published only a few messages and who has a limited number of followers (people reading his Twitter messages). Everyone starts as a Lurker.

Bots – e.g. Keston : website monitoring (10224 messages, 2 followers)
A Bot is a Twitter account on which automatically generated messages are published. Such Twitter accounts can be set up to monitor website availability, to republish headlines of a news site or to indicate which songs have been recorded to name only a few examples of usage. These Twitter accounts have mostly only a limited number of followers and many many updates.

This in itself is quite similar to Forrester’s take (albeit less sophisticated). However, what made this interesting is when they made a graphical representation of this (see graph at the top).

Taking their excellent summary:

The global Twitter community (the Twitosphere) consists of many subcommunities. A subcommunity is charaterized by something the Twitter users have in a common…
In order for a Twitter (sub-) community to be successful, a critical mass of High Influentials and Twitter Stars needs to be present within the community. These High Influentials and Twitter Stars will inspire a lot of followers to use the Twitter platform to exchange messages.

My advice to companies who are looking to make an impact in this space is to be aprt of the community. Add messages, contribute to the conversations and bring your colleagues and peers into the discussion.

 

Technorati Tags: social technographics, groundswell, new media, analyst relations, twitter, twitter facts, forrester research

Filed under: analyst relations   |  2 Comments