Surfing 2.0

In "Groundswell", Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research propose a segmentation of Web 2.0 users and show how companies can profit from those users

All of us are familiar with blogs, online product reviews, community forums, and social networks. Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff have studied these Web 2.0 offerings and how companies have attempted to use these tools or their users for marketing purposes.

The authors use the term ‘groundswell” to refer to the phenomenon by which people use new technologies to obtain things and information from each other. Their definition reads: “The groundswell is a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations.”

From a business perspective, the groundswell amounts to a consumer autonomy movement. Consumers are now much freer to comment on products and to read the comments of other consumers. Obviously it is the web, still only thirteen years old, which has driven this form of consumer collaboration.

More and more people can avail themselves of this consumer collaboration. Three quarters of all Americans and two thirds of all Europeans were online in 2006. More and more of those netizens have the high broadband tools needed to view video content and listen to audio content. South Korea is the world champion in this regard with 90% of its netizens using a broadband connection, while France runs a close second.

The emergence of Web 2.0, the development of the groundswell has put a number of traditional institutions under threat. Media companies are suffering revenue shortfalls as advertising moves online. Branders have lost the upper hand as consumers are redefining the brand online. Brick-and-mortar retailers are losing customers to e-tailers and to individuals selling to other individuals. B2B companies are seeing their customers rate them using new sites such as LinkedIn.

The moral of the story is that companies can ill afford to ignore the groundswell – you have to join it in some way and indeed try to thrive in it. Before trying to profit from groundswell netizens you need to understand who they are. Li and Bernoff help us by proposing a segmentation of the groundswell.

Groundswell segmentation

There are five segments, ranging from the most active to the least active: creators, critics, collectors, joiners and spectators.

The first category, creators, are the people who publish blogs, web pages, post articles, create video and audio content which they upload (to the YouTubes of this world). For example, a Forrester survey indicates that nearly a quarter of Indian netizens perform such online creative activities.

The second category is critics. These are the people who rate products (recall for example your last visit to Amazon), comment on blogs, contribute to online forums or to wikis. A quarter of Indian netizens engage in these forms of online feedback.

Collectors make up the third category. These people save URLs and tags on a social bookmarking service like de.icio.us, vote for web sites on a service like Digg. Only some 10 % of Indian engage in such tagging, but the figure for most other countries is even lower.

The fourth category is joiners. These are the social network participants, the netizens who maintain profiles on sites like Cyworld in South Korea or Facebook in the US. Nearly half of online Indians are joiners. Indeed India leads the world in this category, in front of South Korea which tends to be the California of groundswell.

Spectators constitute the fifth category. These are people who consume all the output produced by the four previous categories but do not contribute to the output. 40% of Indian netizens are only spectators.

Inactives form the final category. These are the netizens who choose to ignore all the blogs, forums and social networking sties that constitute the heart of the groundswell. A little less than a third of online Indians fall in this category.

Obviously a netizen can be a member of several categories: a creator is quite likely to be a critic. A critic is likely to be a joiner. A joiner might very well be a collector.

It is important for companies to know how their customers fall in these segments. What Li and Bernoff call a social technographics profile encompasses such a summarisation (technographics refers to Forrester Research’s methodology for surveying consumers). The profile shows what percentage of your customers are creators, what percentage critics and so on. The higher the percentages, the more you need to engage with the groundswell.

Relative percentages are also important. For example, if many more of your customers are joiners than creators, then you will probably want to put more focus on social networks than on product review sites. If many of them are critics, you need to listen carefully to the review forums. For examples of social technographic profiles, see the chart which gives the social technographics profiles of various countries.

There are five ways of engaging with the groundswell, ranging from the less active to the most active: listening to it, talking to it, energising it, supporting it and embracing it.
The authors argue that listening to the groundswell allows you to overcome the bias of surveys and the limitations of focus groups. You should be listening to the creators blogging about your products, critics rating and reviewing them on various sites. Talking to the groundswell can take several forms: posting a viral video, engaging in social networks, or joining the blogosphere. The best way to energise the groundswell is with ratings and reviews, or by creating or participating online communities for your enthusiastic consumers. Allowing customers to help themselves is both user-friendly and cost-effective hence the spread of community support forums. Customer support is coming less from the companies through call centres  than from the customers themselves. Embracing the groundswell can mean implicating your customers in part of the innovation process. The features of Web 2.0 allow companies to let customers participate in the design and evaluation of new products or services.