Forrester’s Charlene Li recently put out a report with Josh Bernoff titled “Social Technographics” that segments online users into one (or more) of six categories. These segments were derived from studying how consumers approach social technologies – not just the adoption of individual technologies.

Charlene summarizes the report as follows:

We group consumers into six different categories of participation – and participation at one level may or may not overlap with participation at other levels. We use the metaphor of a ladder to show this, with the rungs at the higher end of the ladder indicating a higher level of participation.

Social Technographics represents an interesting look at online users. Grouptivity’s target user would probably fall into at least three of the six categories:

• Creators: Creators self-identify themselves as leaders and influencers (52-56% of them share information with friends about products that interest them). Creators actively create and share content online, a quality that would definitely characterize Grouptivity users.
• Critics: These users engage in conversations and discussions. They make comments, post ratings and reviews. Critics would be most likely to engage in the content networking process that Grouptivity enables.
• Collectors: As the name implies, Collectors are “consumers” of information, they use RSS, tag and bookmark pages. Collector may not actively share content via email, but would most likely use Grouptivity to bookmark or “collect” news articles for later use.

There’s a lot to process and analyze in this report and while the report document is not available for free, a PowerPoint presentation the summarizes its findings is available for free on the web.