This has kind of slipped out under the radar in the midst of all the election noise and yesterday’s widespread reporting of the Facebook f8 developer conference.

But this is significant.

Forrester have launched a new Word Of Mouth analysis tool called Peer Influence Analysis. (Non-subscribers will be able to read an excerpt only).

This builds on and augments their Social Technographics profiling tool that we already use extensively as a framework for properly understanding and analysing the relationships that people have with technology.

Blonde has used Social Technographics data and Social Technographics methodology on numerous occasions to ensure that our strategic thinking is underpinned by insight rather than wishful thinking.

Peer Influence Analysis stands to add another layer to our people-first planning approach. It will allow us to quantify and analyse word of mouth dynamics based on statistically robust, quantitative, sector-specific data.

It adds to the existing Technographics surveys questions that measure “influence impressions” in social networks and “influence posts” on blogs, in blog comments, forum posts, ratings and reviews.

Based on early U.S. data there are some interesting findings.

Peer to peer influence impressions are of a significant scale – in fact the number of “influence impressions” is 25% of the number of paid for online advertising impressions over the same period. Given that a p2p impression will have more influence than an advertising impression this is a big deal.

A small minority of people (6.2%) generate 80% of influence impressions. And 13.4% generate 80% of all influence posts.

Forrester calls these people Mass Connectors and Mass Mavens respectively.

“Mass” being the operative word.

6.2% of the online population in America is 11 million people.

You can’t target these people individually.

That’s why Peer Influence Analysis could be really powerful. It should give us sector-specific insight into the demographics and technographics of Mass Influencers and allow us to develop robust word of mouth content and seeding strategies.

We look forward to UK specific Peer Influence Analysis data becoming available.

A further summary of the tool is available here on the Groundswell blog.

Big news yesterday. Forrester introduced a new category of social behaviour to their Social Technographics model.

Welcome the “Conversationalists”.

Full details of the rationale behind this addition can be found in the Forrester Groundswell Blog post. But the new category has been introduced to recognise the rapid fire, short format status update posting that is epitomised by Twitter and which is now a major part of life on Facebook.

The Conversationalists take their place on the second from top rung of the Technographics ladder as shown below.

Some of the initial commentary has focussed on the positioning of this new behaviour category on the ladder, contending that its relative importance is currently being overstated. (Check out some of the comments on this post on the We Are Social site).

But I think there are bigger issues.

We are huge fans of, and subscribers to, Forrester. And we actively use the Technographics model in planning comms strategy for most of our clients.

Thus far, the model has been very easy to explain. Each behaviour category, from Creators to Spectators, does exactly what it says on the tin. Simple, intuitive, and precisely descriptive.

And, equally important, up until now none of of the various behaviour categories overlapped. People overlapped, in that one person could exhibit more than one of the behaviour types, but the behaviour types themselves were discrete.

The Conversationalists moniker is not so straightforward. For two reasons.

1) It is neither single-minded nor precisely descriptive of the behaviours it claims to encapsulate.

2) It describes a behaviour type that overlaps with at least two of the existing categories.

Let’s look at each of these issues in turn.

Is Twitter a “conversation”?

For some people it might be. But the people whose Twitter streams are a constant flow of @replies are the exception rather than the rule in my experience.

Twitter is a lot of different things to different people. That’s why it is not easy to explain to the uninitiated. Sure there are sporadic outbursts of conversation but certainly in “our” world it is primarily an information/content/ideas exchange. And “conversation” doesn’t accurately describe the nature of that exchange.

The short format status updates of Facebook and Twitter allow you to do similar things. In fact some people annoyingly do exactly the same things at the same time on both, simultaneously posting the same content, verbatim, to both streams.

But, for most people that I’ve spoken to, the whole tone and purpose of Facebook is very different to that of Twitter, even if the status update functionality is similar.

“Conversation” is probably a more accurate description of what happens via Facebook updates.

And that brings us onto the second issue of overlap.

“Conversation” is also an accurate description of what happens in the comment threads of many blog posts. And, in a more lowbrow manner, in the comment threads that accompany YouTube videos.

So there is significant overlap between “conversing” and “commenting”.

To a lesser degree there is also overlap between “conversing” and “creating”, to the extent that regular micro-blogging can be construed as content creation.

And then we have the overlap between Conversationalists and Joiners. Joiners maintain a profile on a social networking site and/or visit social networking sites. Conversationalists update status on a social networking site.

In fact Conversationalists actually feel like a subset of Joiners, exhibiting a particular aspect of Joiner behaviour and doing it at least weekly rather than at least monthly.

All this matters to us because we actively use the model to influence communication strategy. We frequently conduct primary research to create bespoke Technographics profiles for specific audiences.

For instance, we found (perhaps not surprisingly) that people on the UK Hip Hop dance scene indexed through the roof against high-end Creator behaviour. Being able to categorise and quantify this gave us the confidence to create a community hub that largely depended on user generated content.

Hitherto, constructing questionnaires and research methodologies to generate bespoke Technographics profiles has been relatively straightforward because none of the behaviour categories overlapped. If we are to embrace the Conversationalists, this will be more tricky henceforth.

Company blogs, eh. What do you put on them? Forrester Research says no-one trusts them anyway. I buy that up to a point. If all you’re blogging about is your latest press release, or how cool your latest product / service / “viral” is, why should anyone care?

But you have to put something on a company blog. Don’t you? At the very least it should give readers a flavour of the people that work there and their attitude to their work.

With that in mind I have a number of blog titles that I can’t choose between. The one with the popular vote will get written. If you are sufficiently motivated to, please plop a comment in the box indicating your preference. While we’re rebuilding this site there’s no point adding a polling plugin right now.

The candidates are:

• STFU about Web 2.0
• It’s not a viral, it’s a video, n00btard
• What’s the point of blogging?
• TechGnosis – 10 years on
• Now where did I put that Singularity…
• Chillax, it’s just a website
• Twatter
• Wii Fat
• Social Art
• A squirrel eating some fried chicken

Over to you.