I am a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell, author of best sellers The Tipping Point, Outliers and Blink. I am currently reading What the Dog Saw. Gladwell shares many interesting ideas and theories we can apply to social marketing and social media. However, he doesn’t use any new or social media himself according to an interview with Katie Couric.
The first of his theories that comes to mind is one he highlighted in The Tipping Point where he discussed the nature of social epidemics and categorized people as connectors, mavens or salespeople.
Connectors pass information along to the many people they interact with regularly. Mavens collect information and are seen as experts in their fields. Salespeople are naturally persuasive.
Reading about the different roles people play reminds me of two other common approaches to understanding people and technology use – Roger’s Theory of Diffusion of Innovations and Growndswell’s Social Technographics ladder.
According to Roger innovators have a sixth sense of adopting new technology trends. Early adopters follower closely behind and are often young and educated. Early majority adopters tend to have contact with early adopters but are slower to adopt new technology. Late majority adopters are often skeptics with low opinion leadership and laggards are, well, lagging.
In the bestselling non-fiction book, Groundswell, Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research and Charlene Li (now of the Altimeter Group) discussed how we can classify and understand technology users based on their online participation. They designed the Social Technographics ladder to make sense of their findings.
Why does knowing any of this matter? In the past I have discussed the importance of formative research to understand and segment our target audiences. Our level of understanding can make a major difference in how we use/market social technologies based on how our audiences use them.
Do you use any of Malcolm Gladwell’s research or Forrester’s research in your work? What about the Diffusions of Innovations Theory? If so, how?
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