Divers, Swimmers and Waders! Oh My!
Sunday, February 7, 2010 at 11:09AM
Back during college, I learned an interesting lesson about the varying perceptions of participants in an interactive environment. Everyone's got a preference for how "gung ho" they are in a given set of circumstances be it a baseball game, board game or just regular conversation. We can generalize these degrees of participation into three archetypes that we'll call Divers, Waders and Swimmers*
Divers represent your hardcore users who will jump right into the middle of any cool or fun opportunity. These would be Early Adopters of web tech or Hardcore game players. Swimmers are those want to be engaged, but don't want to look silly. Waders are those who are perfectly fine hanging back and observing others. You can map this to your own social group around a social instance of Rock Band. Some people just have to be singers (Divers), others want to be involved, but don't really want the added obligation of showmanship that comes with the mic (Swimmers) and then there are the fans who just love to watch the band play (Waders).
Everyone wants to be catered to in some level and nobody wants to feel like they made the wrong choice about how they're chosing to be involved. I should add that the application of these labels can easily change for people. One person might be a Diver in one situation and a Wader at the next.
I believe there might be an interesting intersection between these archetypal levels of interaction with and contributions to Social Networks. Take a quick look at this from last month's Forrester Reseach report:
Ok, so when we're thinking about Social Games, how do we map this activity graph to the categorization of participants? It seems like there are some pretty obvious parallels. Without delving too much more on this topic, I'm going to throw out the following categorization of these web activities and the archetypes they relate most directly to. Future posts will explore this relationship more as I figure it out.
I'm willing to entertain that there's a possibility of a stronger linkage/overlap between this group of Waders and Swimmers, but that too is a conversation for later.
Games and activities for each of these categories that are well represented in various Social Networks. Interestingly, the Forrester report notes the addition of a new activity category: Conversationalist. Key demographics on this group show that Conversationalists are 56% female and 70% of them are 30+. The first and most immediate thing that jumps to my mind is this is core justification for Twitter and why it's got staying power. Twitter has worked to create if not actually expand a new category of web interaction. Sweet!
So this brings me to my big question, is this relationship just a nice coincidental linkage or do these activities betray deeper use cases in Social Media that can be directly targetted by games and genres that are not presently represented?
Definitely seems to imply some intersting possibilities. What do you think?
*One of the papers from my profs back in school citing Waders/Swimmers/Divers can be found here.
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