Ancient Archetypes in Modern Media

Today is the age of personal media ownership. According to a recent news release from Twitter (http://blog.twitter.com/2011/03/numbers.html) on an average around 4 Billion tweets are sent out every month. From individual point of views, re-tweets, status updates, what’s happening?, and direct messages….Twitter has become the favourite platform for self-expression for many

Every Twitter account can be measured on the following parameters –

Popularity – The number of people following a twitter profile
Pursuit – The number of people whom a twitter profile is following..either for information or interaction
Publishing – The volume of tweets (original) and re-tweets being done by the profile

Basis the above 3 P’s mentioned, we can organize the twitter users into different groups…and each group fit into the classical Archetype.


The Twitter grouping:



On the X- axis is broadly the values of Popularity/Pursuit (for ease of grouping have grouped into 3 categories – less than 1, equal to 1, and greater than 1)
Y-axis represents the volume of tweets – High and Low




Creator: These are people who create something unique and have value. Since they have huge following they can influence a huge number of people by what they say. Usually, the publications, media houses, are the ideal examples that fall into this type of archetype. @nytimes, @cnnbrk, @bbcnews
Ruler/Sage: These are people who exert a lot of control. They are usually successful in their sphere of activity. CEO’s of companies, Thought leaders, Movie Stars, Celebrities are ideal examples that fall into this type of archetype. LadyGaga,@justinbieber, @BarackObama, @KimKardashian @kanyewest, etc
Caregiver: These are people who would love to help others. Either by way of retweeting, or tweeting relevant information they often try and help other achieve their goals. While the active caregiver goes ahead and spreads his network by following more number of people (and expect reciprocal following) the inactive caregiver is happy with the small universe he follows or being followed. Each of us would have our own caregivers archetypes in our twitter network. The ideal profile in my network is @Unseenntmktg
Regular: All he wants is to ‘fit in’. Being connected to others is his prime driving force. He also loves to see that others also connect to him. Most of the people here have reciprocal connections – You follow me, I follow you. A bulk of the people you find on Twitter would fall in this category
Explorer: An Explorer archetype is a person who keeps following people. What drives him is journeying the world by following others. While he mostly re-tweets about others experiences, He also shares the happenings around him. But he mainly wants to enrich himself by the experience of others
Outlaw: He believes in himself, and has a will to transform this world. While he follows a lot number of people, the number of people following him is usually low. The reason attributed to the same is that many would not like to be associated with a rebel in a public platform. However, there are some Outlaw archetypes who achieve cult status and thus would fall in the Ruler/Sage archetype mentioned earlier.
The reason for understanding the twitter archetypes is that it can give you some insight into specific characteristics of a specific twitter group…through which one can understand the motivations and behavior. While most of the archetype might resonate, there could be exceptions..

So which archetype are you??

Santosh
Twitter: @santosheg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

10 Reasons Marketing Strategy should include the Internet

Best Indian websites - 2007

Teach Marketing, Yoda Can