What are Our Roles in Groundswell?

In Groundswell, chapter 1 and 2 introduce the importance of social media in the modern society, and the "user manual" of the major social medias. These two chapters make us realized that social medias are changing the social communication structure rapidly. There is a video shows the big change by social media.

Chapter 3 illustrates the social technographics profile by different perspectives. In the end of this chapter, it shows why do people participate into groundswell. It is a good summary of the previous chapters, and it is also a good beginning of the following topics. Now, we are ready to make a plan in groundswell.

Chapter 4 introduces the strategies in groundswell, which include the five objectives that companies can pursue in the groundswell: Listening, talking, energizing, supporting and embracing (P 68), and the POST process (P 72). Chapter 5 and 6 tell us the methods and cases of listening and talking in the groundswell, for a group or a single person, they are more than input and output channels.


After read these six chapters, we knew that we are users in social media, or a participants in groundswell. However, if "users" mean people, it is far from enough, we also want to know what roles the people are:

When we are using social media, we would like to use "users" to name our self  "Users" mean that we have both rights and obligations in social media, it defines the participants by an integrated view. Actually, we are playing different roles in social media activities, not only "users". In the chapter 3 in Groundswell, it introduces a new way to explain our roles in social media activities: the social technographics ladder.

In the social technographics ladder, there are seven groups of participant relate to groundswell: creators, conversationalists, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators and inactives (P 43). What are the characteristics of each groups? There is a picture can illustrate them:

Through this picture, we can know that we are playing different roles in groundswell. For companies, the data of these roles can be the resources which are used to support PR and making marketing plan. For example, spectators are the biggest group in these roles (P 44), so we can see that most of the advertising in social media are existed in this area. 

Further, as a new way of communication, the using of social media has obvious age characteristics:

In this picture, we can see that the young people are more likely to participate in social media as different roles. The senior people are less likely to participate in social media, because they have long time traditional communication concept, and some new social media technology might be difficult to them. 

Base on huge researches of the roles of participants, and integrated specific business strategies, company can make an accurate value proposition in PR or marketing. Company knows that there are 70% of youth in 18-21 age stage are joiners, so they can design lively and popular elements in their PR and marketing, like pop music, fancy news and creative services. Once company knows who we are, what we need, and how do we touch information, it will be a big chance to build stable relationships in their business.