Forrester has introduced an important amendment to its Social Technographics approach. They have introduced a new rung on their latter, called Conversationalists. This is behavior adopted by a third of Internet users.
Josh Bernoff explains the new category:
As you can see from the graphic, we added a new rung, “Conversationalists”. Conversationalists reflects two changes. First, it includes not just Twitter members, but also people who update social network status to converse (since this activity in Facebook is actually more prevalent than tweeting). And second, we include only people who update at least weekly, since anything less than this isn’t much of a conversation.
Conversationalists intrigue me. They’re 56% female, more than any other group in the ladder. While they’re among the youngest of the groups, 70% are still 30 and up.
As I’ve written before, I think that the ladder should include a classification of “Sharers.” This behavior is broader than being in conversations; it is behavior that looks at social media tools as important distribution channels for interesting information, both original and shared. Status updates are a part of this activity.
