The Fs of Citizen Marketing

Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba has created the 4 Fs of citizen marketers. This is an elegant idea which distills some of the types of bloggers and new media activists you find in the blogosphere.

The 4 Fs are:

1) Filters

These are the aggregators of news, posts, podcasts, youtubes and what-have-yous about various companies, brands, or topics and package it into a digestible format. They are usually objective, but may sometimes diverge into opinion shaping.

2) Fanatics

The true believers and evangelists. They love to analyze the daily or weekly progress of a brand, product, organization, or person and prescribe courses of action. They are, essentially, volunteer coaches. May be critical if they spot obvious failures.

3) Facilitators

These creators of communities and fan clubs provide a means for people to share, interact and socialise online. Their primary citizen marketer tool is a Web-based bulletin board or community software. Facilitators are like the mayors of online towns, and some online communities exceed the populations of small cities.

4) Firecrackers

Firecrackers are the one-hit wonders of citizen marketers. They can attract considerable attention because they have created a song, animation, video, or novelty that generates a lot of interest but tends to die out quickly as the creators go on with their other work. You probably can find many of them on youtube, like the Mentos and Coke explosion videos, Lonely Girl and other phenomenon.

To add to the 4 Fs above, I would like to add a 5th F which is Fellowship. I believe that all bloggers and advocates of Citizen Marketing would have a strong affinity to friendship and relationship forming. Often, the success of any citizen marketing venture falls on the ability to connect on a human and emotional level.

Much more here