This post touches on social media engagement but it’s more generally a demonstration of the process of conceptualization itself. The discipline of imagining and developing these kinds of concepts is the deliverable I’ve been developing for the past few years and converting into the Open Conceptual enterprise model. Social media just happens to be one of the most dynamic and opportune domains right now.
One concept that caught my attention recently is the Socialgraphics Engagement Pyramid, developed by Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyang at the Altimeter Group:
What first struck me was that while I was inclined to interpret these as “stages,” which people can progress up through, the relationships between them are not necessarily continuous. I understand that the folks at Altimeter may not have conceived these as stages like I did, but I think a lot of people at a more advanced level ought to discuss different types of users not just in terms of static segments but as occurring in dynamic processes of becoming something else.
Another notion that struck me was that Watching and Commenting are both ways of giving or contributing in to something, while Sharing and Producing are both ways of generating or distributing out to others. I wondered if these might best be arranged into quandrands — with Curating, which is a bit of everything, occupying the centre.
Doesn’t look very pretty — and it doesn’t convey the size of each group, which the pyramid does quite effectively — nor does it convey the dynamic qualities of how these don’t merely stand in relation to each other but actually flow.
My next thought was that there might be some kind of spiral or fractal pattern that gradually converges in around the centre, which would illustrate the size of the different groups and how they flow into each other. I started doing an image search and that led me to this:
Background image by Dave Stokes: http://www.flickr.com/photos/33909700@N02/ / CC BY 2.0
The notion of “cyclonic engagement” may not be best for marketers looking for a sense of stability for framing strategies, but I think we need to talk and think more about how the different types of engagement tend to affect each other: each phase “pulls in” the phases below it, while the lower, more massive phases provide the pressure and momentum that keep the whole process moving.
This would probably be more useful for thinking about media, rather than marketing. Marketers have more control over the whole process — they can dip in and out a little more freely, addressing specific types of people at will (though I expect this will change, as marketers are increasingly becoming media themselves) — whereas media folks swim deep inside the process and never really get outside or above it.
I’m not talking about how media people market themselves, I’m talking about media as it pertains to the real value and uses of actual news and knowledge — how it affects our discussions about culture, politics, economics, etc…
Just some things to think about for now. I’ll have to dive deeper another time.
Notes:
• Technically it would have been more appropriate to call this an “Engagement Vortex” (a cyclone is just a special kind of vortex) but I didn’t want it to turn into calculus homework — nor did I like the “black hole” connotations.
• Also for the sake of avoiding the wrong connotations, I turned the picture on its side to make it look less like a toilet being flushed.
• And I changed “Commenting” to “Replying” because the longer word played havoc on the aesthetic proportions.
• Lastly, I stuck with “curation” for the sake of not bringing too many discussions into one, but the meanings and merits of that term in this context are worth discussing. Read Joanne McNeil’s post at Tomorrow Museum if you haven’t yet.
