Syndicom

Are you one of the 48% “spectators” out there on the web?

Or perhaps one of the 18% “creators”? Maybe you are a “joiner”, as are 25% of US adults online?

Recently I revisited Groundswell and Li and Bernoff’s social technographics ladder where they define classes of web 2.0 participants according to their activity or contribution to the technologies with which they associate. I thought we might ask the same question of the members of SpineConnect and readers of this blog, to reflect on your own participation in this realm, be it for personal or professional reasons.

Often when I am conducting team or small group communication workshops, I have participants fill out a questionnaire called Belbin’s Team Roles Questionnaire. The format is a series of questions where people respond with particular rankings of how they tend to respond to particular situations. Those rankings are then tallied and your ‘team roles’ emerge. More often than not, there is a single dominant role that we tend to play in teams across the board. Sometimes this is followed closely by another secondary role, but then the rest fade away. What I have observed across time is a shift away from the roles of ’shaper’ (the change agent), ‘plant’ (creator), and ‘completer’ and ‘coordinator’ (self explanatory) roles and a groundswell move towards the more tactical roles of ‘implementer’ and ‘team player’. There are a few ‘monitors’ and ‘resource investigators’ out there, but they are a mere smattering and much sought after in team formation! I like to use this questionnaire because while we can talk about collaboration, I think there are some particular traits, or personal attributes which enable people to play particular roles in the performance of collaborative work. I have also observed that once people become aware of their dominant team ‘roles’ they begin to perform them more consistently, making the questionnaire results something close to a self fulfilling prophecy.

In Groundswell, Li and Bernoff make a very clear argument that while the composite web 2.0 technologies are fascinating in and of themselves, what is most important is the kind of participation and relationships they construct. They offer a ’social technographics’ ladder where they classify people on the web into categories based on the kinds of activities in which they engage. Creators, for example, publish a blog or their own web pages, upload video and music they created and sometimes write articles and post them. Critics post ratings and reviews and comment on other people’s blogs, contribute to forums and wikis. Collectors use RSS feeds and add tags to photos and web pages, sometimes ‘voting’ for websites online. Joiners maintain a profile on and visit social networking sites; while spectators read blogs, watch video from others, listen to podcasts and read online forums and customer reviews. It doesn’t stop there. Li and Bernoff also present some interesting cultural differences in terms of participation in these technologies. While creators represent 18% of the US online population, they represent 38% of the South Korean population. 25% of the US online population may be critics, but in Japan, 36% is. Finally, inactives remain across cultures, running at 41% of the US, 53% of the European and 37% of the South Korean online populations.

If you work with or are in touch with colleagues outside the US, you might want to ask them the same question I ask of you — are you a Creator, Critic, Collector, Joiner, Spectator or Inactive in the web 2.0 groundswell? You never know what you might conjure up in terms of changing the ways you relate to each other and the kinds of activities in which you participate together!

Kirsten Broadfoot