Where are you on the social technographics ladder?

There are six levels of social computing behaviors and participation on the social technographic ladder. Social technographc is a described as a population according to its participation in these levels. Currently, brands, websites and other companies have found that they must pursue social technologies to analyze their customer’s profiles to target them and achieve marketing goals. I wonder if categorizing behaviors really helps them reach their goals.

The following is a list of these social technographic levels.

1) Creators publish blogs, have WebPages and upload videos and music. These are the people on top of the ladder that I feel participate most and have the most creative style.

2) Critics are people who post ratings, review products and comment on other people’s blogs. They also contribute to forums and edit articles in a wiki.

3) Collectors are ones that use RSS feed, vote for websites, add tags to WebPages or photos.

4) Joiners are people who maintain a profile on a social network sites or visit the site.

5) Spectators read logs, listen to podcast, watch videos and read online forums.

6) Inactive people do not participate at all.


Since there are a lot of different levels of behavior that people can fall into, they can stay at one level or advance and combine levels of participation as they get more active and creative. Obviously, there is a combination of behaviors in most of us that do this, therefore, whatever category you fall into will bring you closer to being social and keep you interested in all the things that you can learn and participate in. Amazingly, I am realizing that there is nothing like this in the past and I really enjoy trying to fall into all of the categories, except the inactive one, where everyone starts out at and eventually starts climbing the social technographic ladder.

I included a picture of the ladder from an interesting blog entitled "One Rung Up" by Steve Woodruff where he added one more rung called "organizers, who are people to build communities, aggregate information, collect and distribute, connect people and resources. I think this is a good addition to the ladder but, this may be a combination of all the other behaviors.