People are pesky.

So it says if you click on the ‘People’ button in the affectionately named ‘amoeba’ flash panel on our homepage.

They are pesky, not just because they have too many shoes. They are pesky because they have a habit of surprising you and confounding your assumptions.

At Blonde we embrace this peskiness by talking to people. We talk to as many people as we can as often as we can.

And they never fail to surprise us. For which read that we always learn something useful.

That something might be a huge insight that unlocks an innovative strategy. It might be a smaller insight (for instance that b2b audiences are no fans of locked pdf documents), responding to which allows our clients to appear more thoughtful. As often as not it will be a reminder that we need to get our heads out of the emerging technology clouds and get our feet back on the average Joe ground.

Take a look at this video if you want to see just how far we can get our heads up our own bottoms if we insulate ourselves in an early-adopter world of Buzz versus Twitter blog posts and such like. It was produced by Google and asks a simple question of normal people – ‘What is a browser?’

In the recent past we have spoken to classical musicians, breast cancer sufferers, energy advisors, record company execs, independent financial advisors, journalists, high net worth individuals, social entrepreneurs, runners, higher education managers, internal stakeholders from several clients, and a whole range of ordinary folk of various shapes, sizes, backgrounds and locations.

Every conversation has been useful, having a direct impact on strategy and/or execution.

As it says on our homepage, ‘People are pesky. Everything we do is for them.’

Primary research to understand the people associated with a brief sounds like an obvious thing to do, but it can be inconvenient to the agency and/or the client that is in a blinkered hurry to use the latest technology.

We are huge fans of Forrester’s people-first approach to digital planning, and their Social Technographics model.

Understanding people’s relationships with technology (by asking them) ensures that your digital strategies are underpinned by the truth rather than wishful thinking.

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.