Two analysts from Forrester Research, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, have an interesting blog called “Groundswell, Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies”, with an associated book.

What is a groundswell? Technically by definition it is:

1.  
   A sudden social gathering of force, as of public opinion, or
   A broad deep undulation of the ocean, often caused by a distant storm

In this case, it is all about the wave of rapidly growing use of social technologies such as YouTube, Facebook, podcasts, wikis, blogs, and other online communities, etc. This ‘social evolution’ is more important, more profound than the technology evolutions we have seen in the past; the 2.0 society seems to be progressing faster than we’ve seen with Web 2.0 itself.

In line with the growth of online technology, the core of the authors’ work in Groundswell is the analysis of a comprehensive North American study of their customers’ social technology adoption behabviours. This resulted in the creation of a ‘Social Technographics Ladder’, classifying the level of adoption from the ‘inactives’ who remain untouched by this social revolution through to a scale of ‘actives’:

The Inactives – Those who don’t participate in any kind of online social activity
The Spectators – Who digest websites, blogs, forums, videos and/or podcasts
The Joiners – They surf and have a profile or two on social networking sites
The Collectors – Are picking up RSS feeds, tagging and booking/voting for web pages
The Critics – Typically contribute to forums, comment on blogs, and edit material on wikis
The Creators – Publish their own blogs and websites, and paste their videos or materials to sites such as Technorati or YouTube

Thanks to the volume of data they secured, the authors were able to map out the profiles across the generations. Interestingly the data showed evidence of all the ladder types across each generation – yes, Creators in the 60+ age group do exist regardless of potential typecasting. The Web2.0 world is not just a generational issue by any means but it’s no suprise that Generation Y are way ahead in making the far highest contributions!

To learn more about the study see Groundswell