Thank you Beet.TV.
There is a lot of interest in tap into the wealth of behavioural data that is unlocked by social media applications. There has not been a lot of tools that really go beyond traditional demographic or web analytic measures.
Groundswell is Forrester Research’s new tool for understanding the social media ecosystem of: Creators; Critics; Collectors; Joiners; Spectators and Inactives. Groundswell provides some initial breakdowns using basic demographic data (Age; Country; Sex) to identify the composition of the social group according to their Social Technographics® and compared to the general population.
Interesting stuff. Unfortunately there is no data about Canada.
It’s tied to the release of Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff‘s book of the same name, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. I’m really curious at how much data they collected, it’s probably better than most anecdotal evidence but the quote from book site is a little nebulous:
"hard consumer data and experience with dozens of companies"
Apparently it’s based on "65 corporate examples including 25 full case studies". But it’s interesting to begin to build a profile of the audience and the general archetypes. This basic level of research is designed to get you to purchase additional research from Forrester. And it’s a very good start. I wonder how many media startups are not able to provide similar basic demographic details about their audience. What happens when we move beyond CPMs and CPCs? At Nakama, the behaviour analysis tools were very immature, probably a contributing factor to our failure, but we understood to build a "mobile social community" we needed to understand who was using our site, from where and what they were doing on the site. In our case, it turned out that it was to upload pictures of their wangs (yep, not their Wangs). It would have been very interesting to have build our strategies and tactics on the understanding of the social media ecosystem provided by Groundswell.