The real thing, the virtual thing.

Once again, I keep thinking about the matters expressed in "Online networking skills...". Today I was standing in front of a desk: the secretary was full engaged in her telephone conversation, and I -the "real one" in front of her- was kept waiting, like a sort of uninvited guest. Somehow I was competing with a stranger from the "outside, online world" to get her attention, although I came personally to be first in the line.

Which brings me to the subject. About ten years ago, I discovered a nice Forrester study called "Technographics" which divided the audience according to their orientation to a) family, career or entertainment b) optimistic or pesimistic towards technology and c) low and high income. Ten clusters emerged in that research, and that was useful to map demographic profiles, market on-line offerings, target some e-commerce iniciatives, etc. Great work.

Ten years after, Forrester did roughly the same trick in a Web2.0 context (see Fig above). 50% of people have nothing to do with web or just stare at blogs: they would salute you off-line, saying "nice blog" but hardly interacting via comments. In this so-called 2.0 era we should seriously consider that silent multitude and question ourselves: "are we talking too much?".

Linking this with my previous post, I can plot nicely how much real life, Linked-In, or Blogspot threaten our communication style. All in all, the secretary at her desk will stay tunned to her phone, future jobs will come from LinkedIn, and we´ll have some new friends via Blogspot, according to our own Social Technographics profile.

And yes, I´m about to do that nice ppt chart. Some day.

PS: I was encouraged to do some typing in English in order to broad my audience. There will be no rules about this: some days I´ll switch to Spanish, and some other some Spanglish may be the default.