Day: July 14, 2010

12 Personas to show you who’s online and how they feel about being online

If you want to use social media to build relationships with your customers and prospects, you’ll want to have a very good idea of exactly who they are. ExactTarget and CoTweet have done the heavy-lifting to develop 12 online personas to help you understand customer expectations and behavior on social media.

Their report examines both user-generated content and user-content consumption and charts the results. Here is a quick list of the 12 social media profiles.

  1. Inner Circle: more interested in keeping and enhancing existing relationships than making new ones. Facebook is the tool of choice. Marketers will have a tough time reaching them.
  2. Cautious: very selective about what they share online. If they “Like” a company Facebook Page, it’s only because their friend owns the company. Facebook is their daily tool, but they attempt to keep their social footprint small.
  3. Info Seeker: they’re in search of information and consume it when they find it. They don’t create much content. They’ll “Like” a Facebook Page so they can share, not receive.
  4. Enthusiasts: their offline interests and hobbies drive them online. They intentionally use Facebook to show their support for favorite brands. Enthusiasts rely on each other, not companies, for information.
  5. Deal Seekers: they’re hungry for promotional content everywhere they can get it. Believe it or not, their median income is actually above the national media income.
  6. Shoppers: these folks are more interested in talking about shopping than actually buying something online. Instead, they scour the Internet researching upcoming purchases. Quality, not savings, drives their quest for content.
  7. News Junkie: you know this one—they spend a lot of time searching for late-breaking news. The contribute a ton of content, too, especially as comments on news sites. Surprisingly, they’re even “more likely to read product reviews than Shoppers, Enthusiasts, and Deal Seekers.”
  8. Gamer: the Internet exists to connect these folks with both games and other gamers.
  9. Social Butterfly: you also know this one—”making and maintaining a lot of online friendships” is top priority for them. [hey, stop staring at me. I’m not a social butterfly. I could stop at any time, if I wanted to. Really, I could.] They both create and consume massive amounts of content. Folks fitting this persona make up a relatively small portion (13%) of online users.
  10. Business First: heavy content creators but focused on using everything for business purposes. Also a small group (8%). Though they’re not likely to follow brands on Twitter, “they are the most active on Twitter.” Facebook is NOT the tool of choice. [see, I told you I’m not a Social Butterfly. I’m a Business First guy, right? Oh, wait, maybe not: this is the “most affluent” persona. Guess I’m back to Social Butterfly.]
  11. Megaphone: another one you’re probably quite familiar with. They’re aggressive online, receive more email than anyone else, but see Facebook and Twitter as preferred avenues of interaction with brands. While they’re The Influencers, they are also easily influenced and are “more likely to become a subscriber, fan or follower at the recommendation of others.”
  12. Open Book: they lay it all out on the table. Though they don’t follow brands on Twitter, they are very active on Twitter. If you want to reach them, you’ll have to be very open in encouraging and responding to candid feedback.

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Facilitating Integration: Functional lines blurring due to social media

At this point there seems to be few parts of traditional organizations and the functions within them that will not be touched or even perhaps radically altered by the forces of social media connectivity and communications. But there are still many naysayers out there asking

Why do we need social media?



Some typical responses from those who still don’t get it:

To share inane updates with random persons only hungering for us to follow them back?

To expose ourselves to just one more medium where avid advertisers can spam us into submission?

No if there wasn’t more than this, I would set the Twitter Fail Whale as my screensaver and never turn the application on again! (exercising maximum restraint to avoid mentioning obvious parallel to recent Twitter service uptime issues; oops I guess I just did, sorry @biz =)

Fortunately there’s more, much more to social media that can and will make a difference. A difference in one to one communications, one to many communications and most importantly to all manner of human organizations.

So what is functional integration and why should we all want more of it?

Easiest place to start is to think about what are all the things we hate most about typical organizations today?

Departments which have become little fiefdoms dedicated only to the glory of their self important manager to the detriment of all else.

Companies to whom suppliers and customers have become no more than predatory targets to latch onto and suck their blood until they die.

So what’s new, isn’t that just the way most big companies have been for the last 100 plus years?

And how’s social media going to make a difference in the face of such utter dysfunction?

Well first off there’s nothing better when it comes to Smashing the Silos with Social Media. So whether it’s between departments in one company or between companies needing to work together for improvement, the nature of hypercommunication via social media makes quick work of any little emperors who might try and get in the way.

Through social media, the truth always seems to find its way through any attempts to distort or stop it. There’s now just too many eyes and voices feeding a collective pool of information available to all for the truth not to emerge sooner or later.

So the bottom line for those companies or people who think they can go on treating their customers and co-workers like garbage is that their days are numbered.

Before, except in the most extreme of cases, they could easily divide and conquer those customers who dared to speak the truth about their shoddy service or products. Now a simple keyword search on Twitter reveals what the world really thinks of them. And if they also treat their employees in a similar manner, just what their employees also think of them.

Add to this their environmental record, product quality, social responsibility and even customer service and you get the picture of this new era of accountability and transparency.

And if we really would like to have some fun with this and truly make a difference, the simple application of the above to politics, countries and even the entire planet will reveal the ultimate potential.

Jeff Ashcroft