Socialgraphics and the engagement pyramid

An interesting presentation here by Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyang (Altimeter Group/ex Forresters) on the importance of understanding how  your audience interacts and engages in social media.

In essence, what they’re saying here is that to operate successfully in this space, brands need to look beyond traditional demographics, geographics and psychographics and try to understand the socialgraphic behaviour of their target audience – e.g. how they behave in social media, why do they behave in this way and who influences them.  I particularly like the engagement pyramid which breaks down social engagement into the different behavioural types.

To be honest, it shares very similar principles to Forrester’s technographics ladder which also profiles different behaviour according to their predisposition to participate.  Incidentally, this was updated this week to include ‘conversationalists’ to account for the growing number who regularly tweet or update their statuses on social networking sites.

Both models are quite simple but that’s exactly why I like them as they’re easy to relate to, understand and apply!  In fact, the above presentation goes on to explain how some brands have used these  socialgraphic insights to inform their social strategy.  Worth reading.