Expanded Groundswell Continuum

Whenever I see a linear scale, I'm reminded of the liberal/conservative dichotomy promoted by the Democrats and Republicans.  Socially liberal, fiscally conservative citizens like yours truly have to turn to the second dimension to get our views included, cf. the Nolan Chart.

Because of my bias towards a diversity of opinions, when I saw Josh Bernoff's description of the Purist-Corporatist scale and Shel Israel's complaints that he's not a pure purist, I tried to conceive of a more inclusive graph.  My guess is that the misunderstanding between these two fine social media theorists is disagreement about the classification system, not a disagreement about the fundamentals.

First, my interpretation of Josh's original scale. 

After reading Shel's commentary on being labeled as a purist, I sensed two forces at work here: the influence of users and the effect of the marketing department.  My expanded version of the scale has two axes.  The x-axis is defines who in the corporation should control the message; the y-axis describes the impact of users through social media.

I took a stab at defining the quadrants:

• Purists believe that users are/will be extremely influential and that marketing departments should be abolished.  The message will grow organically from the conversation between the individuals within the corporation and the users.
• Corporatists believe that the marketing department just needs to spend more dollars to control the effect of the groundswell and that, in the end, their message will prevail.
• Grounswellists are in the middle: they believe that there's a place for the the structure of the marketing department and the authenticity of individual conversations.
• I jokingly referred to quadrant 1, where social media and traditional marketing both rule, as the land of PR Flacks proclaiming to be experts in social media (not my PR firm, of course).
• Quadrant 3 is also somewhat of a joke, in that engineers hate both marketers and suggestions from users.  Am I a funny guy or what?

My definition of the axes here surely isn't the only one.  Did I pick the right axes?  Is there a better way to describe the groundswell vs. corporate marketing?

Comments

[Josh Bernoff]

Fascinating post, Mark. Although your jokes about quadrants 1 and 3 make me wonder. Maybe these scales aren't all that independent of each other.

[shel israel]

Nice job, Mark. My disagreement with Josh is that he has attempted to reduce my philosophy into a box with a single word classification. Being a "purist" is a great way to dismiss all the thoughts and ideas I have contributed over the past four years. I further object that when I took issue with Josh, he discounted my objections. He apparently thinks he knows who and what I am better than I do.

[shel israel]

An example of over-reduction is your statement that "Purists" believe marketing departments should be abolished. That is nt my view, nor has it ever been my view. This is an example when people try too hard to oversimplify. They end up misrepresenting.