I think of ‘Stakeholders’ as a group of people who will be impacted by, or have an interest in a specific project, although these impacts / interests might be for different reasons. For example:
- Employees, customers and shareholders are different stakeholders of a corporation
- Sponsors, implementers and adopters would be stakeholders of a project or change initiative

Do you think ‘Stakeholders’ should be a separate group, in addition to: ‘Audience’, ‘Constituency’ and ‘Persona’?

Many of your questions arise from elements requiring explanation. There may be better ways to represent these things, so it doesn’t need so much explanation. I’ll be in touch to see if we can find a time to discuss. Thanks again!

a colleague once told me, as a compliment, that I’m able to turn complex concepts into simple concepts. More than a compliment, though, I take that as a personal limitation: since I have a hard time understanding complex concepts, I need to break them down into easier ideas to really understand it.
I’m telling you that cause this was the approach I used to analyze the integrated digital plan…
So, looking at the chart and reading your comments I came up with some questions/considerations:

1. it’s a great piece of work! I can’t think of any missing element here!!

2. you wrote that “content”, “media”, “metrics” and “analytics” are the core pillars of digital M&C… so why aren’t they represented as pillars in the model?

2a. I could not figure out a practical difference between “metrics” and “analytics” (but that’s not so relevant at this point, we can discuss it later)

2b. I tend to see “social engagement”, “search”, “mobile”, etc as a deeper level of detail of the “media” pillar, so I’d exclude them from here to make things simpler.

3. you have two big converging arrows (“engagement plan” on the right and “inputs/objectives/constituents” on the left), right? I don’t get exactly where they are converging to, which is the element that puts them together? I think the right arrow should point to the “objectives”, which are the ultimate goal of the digital plan.

3a. it’s hard for me to see “inputs/objectives/constituents” grouped together since “objectives” are exclusively internal to the company and “constituents/inputs” can be internal and/or external.

4. I see “listening” and “measurement” but I don’t see the real action, the implementation of the activity. And I also have a hard time understanding why the “content” pillar is included in the “listening” activity (shouldn’t it be independent of content?) I actually see “listening”, “implementation” and “measurement” not as elements of the model itself but as activities that grab from the model only the pillars they need.

I tried to represent all those considerations in a slightly different version of the model you can find here (full screen mode suggested): http://prezi.com/3mx95tg4zqic/integrated-digital-plan/

I assumed that in planning a digital activity you first need to listen, then act and then measure. Once you have started, these activities can happen at the same time but for the purpose of this analysis I considered them separately.

Please feel free to comment and edit (use this link to edit: http://prezi.com/3mx95tg4zqic/edit/?auth_key=yr91nzp&follow=ngop8t3r8jt4)
and let me know if my assumptions and considerations are in line with your initial thoughts on the model… it’s actually psychologically hard to discuss a topic with the one who created it, it’s like talking about reggae with Bob Marley or psychoanalysis with Freud…

I’ve been espousing to IBMers ( http://ow.ly/90IKe ) the importance of clearly defining and differentiating their digital personas, the online faces they present to friends vs family vs professionals. Though I think, in time, we’ll see persona gradation and blending as technology catches up to support the spectrum of faces we present, for now people present themselves with a set of narrowly defined hats: their personas (we’ll get to personae).

That’s the side of the coin I’ve been focused on, but you bring up the other: what of the personae we market to? The ones we target User Experiences to?

If technology is enabling people to manage facets of their self separately, we should also be able to identify each of those facets, rather than the whole individual. Perhaps they’ll even provide it: “This is my professional profile” (on LinkedIn). That allows us to understand the types of personae that are in an audience, to find correlations between them because we’re looking at real people rather than mannequins. They have fuller, richer digital behavior than we can invent. The cool thing about it is that people are putting themselves out there, they want to be seen and they want us to know what they represent and what they care about. We can learn a lot from them, and we have real people we can approach to test our theories.

(side note: I did have to go look up personas vs personae after reading your post: http://ow.ly/90IV1 )

One nuance: I would include ‘shared interests’ in the definition of constituencies as this might more easily connect ‘constituencies’ to the similar concepts of ‘communities’ (to Goldie’s point) and Seth Godin’s work on ‘Tribes’ (see his TED talk here): http://www.ted.com/talks/seth_godin_on_the_tribes_we_lead.html

My attempt at defining the groups:
- A Constituency is an activated group of people who share a common psychographic (a higher level set of examples might be: Interest, Ambition, Belief). They self-identify with a cause or a shared belief and seek change.
- An Audience is a passive group of people who share a common demographic (e.g. age, postcode, job title)
- A Persona is a fictional profile. Each profile is developed to represent a group of web users / stakeholders (and is likely to include a combination of fictional psychographics and demographics).

The next step in my mind is to define WHEN to use each type of grouping.

My thoughts:

If the aim is to target people via TRADITIONAL outbound paid media, we would probably need to define an audience (with demographics). This would result in REACH.

If the aim is to take advantage of the rapidly emerging opportunities to LISTEN to people, REACH them and ENGAGE with them ONLINE and in the SOCIAL BUSINESS space, then constituency would be the choice. Existing constituencies are visible throughout the public web via social sites, so we can listen to what is being discussed and organised within these groups. We can engage with a constituency online (on their terms) as well as REACH them through push marketing (on the organisation’s terms). Anyone with internet access who fits the constituency definition has the opportunity to participate (think of an active online group you are part of). Online, these people are essentially standing up and announcing their interest / belief / ambition. There are many ways organisations could gain value from reaching and engaging people in constituencies including:
- research activities (including simple listening / Social Intelligence)
- understanding customer language, so marketing content and messages can use the same lingo
- improving product development processes by generating feedback / input and/or crowdsourcing ideas within relevant constituencies
- having internal experts brainstorm new innovations / solutions within a constituency of experts (internal and/or external)
- extend customer relationship management to the places relevant constituents gather
- drive demand for your offerings by sharing valuable, appropriate information
- leveraging a constituency of enthusiasts to provide scalable support
- finding potential new employees, based on them being a member of a constituency with desired psychographics
- Insights gathered from constituencies could inform the development of fictional representative personas…

If you’re looking for a METHOD to ensure all major stakeholders / users / types of customer are catered for in a new digital product design (website, application etc), then personas would be the grouping to develop and use.

I’m interested to hear whether others agree/disagree. Are there other ways of thinking about groups of people, or other nuances?

Another one that came up in a conversation today is “market segment” — but I think the word “audience” can cover that as well.