When Forrester Research’s Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s Groundswell book came out last year I couldn’t help comparing their ladder of engagement with Sherry Arnstein’s ladder of participation from 1969. Arnstein’s ladder is a powerful model for thinking about how much influence people have in public programmes in terms of the actual participation processes, which span from where citizens have control at the top to where they are simply being manipulated at the bottom. Li and Bernoff’s ladder of engagement mixes Arnstein’s metaphor by segmenting the users of social media technologies by the degree to which they create or consume content: suggesting that this should shape strategies about how brands should actually engage with customers based on their propensity to participate.

Arnstein’s model has been critcised for being linear and this criticism is equally valid as far as Li and Bernoff’s version because people may participate more or less depending on the context and this may change over time. Despite Li/Bernoff’s mixing of metaphors about people and processes, and the linearity of their model, it’s considered by some to be a useful framework for developing social media strategies. It does, however, appear to begs as many questions about enterprise action as it answers, including: what, where, when, why, who with and how much you should spend compared to more traditional communications approaches. It also doesn’t appear to answer what is perhaps the most important question facing brands and that’s whether it’s better not to engage at all than to do it badly!