The Dells, the GMs and even the Marriotts are not the norm when it comes to corporate blogging. In fact, a small percentage of Fortune 500 companies have an external blog.
Todd Defren at PR Squared posted recently about his chat with Fortune 500 marketers asking very basic questions about blogging. The good news, he says, is that they are interested and engaged… even cautiously experimental.
Over at MicroPersuasion, Steve Rubel talks about the new Forester Research report from Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff called Social Technographics. Their research uses the analogy of the participation ladder that looks a little something like this:
The majority of people are “inactives” (52%). This group does not read blogs, watch peer-generated video (YouTube, Google Video), listen to podcasts, use social networks (MySpace, Facebook), use RSS, tag Web pages, comment on blogs, publish or maintain a blog, upload video or publish a Web page.
Borrowing a phrase from the diffusion of innovations theory, as public relations PRos, we understand that innovators and early adopters are not the majority of consumers (or clients or stakeholders). The category breakdown looks like this: (from Wikipedia, which does a nice job with these descriptions).
- innovators – venturesome, educated, multiple info sources, greater propensity to take risk (2.5% of people)
- early adopters – social leaders, popular, educated (13.5%)
- early majority – deliberate, many informal social contacts (34%)
- late majority – skeptical, traditional, lower socio-economic status (34%)
- laggards – neighbours and friends are main info sources, fear of debt (16%)
Early adopters are important for communicators to reach because of the “social leader” and “popular” ideas in the categories above. But the higher the costs (financial, social/reputational, opportunity), the longer it takes for an idea to diffuse. And really, participating in social media has a high cost.
As you think about recommending social media strategies to clients in the future, or how to participate in them yourself, consider these categories (both Li’s and the diffusion categories). Based on where your audiences are on the participation ladder, what strategies and tactics will you need to use?
