There are four kinds of social channel communication in a model used by influence marketing superstar Matt Broberg. Matt shared this model in a recent interview on the excellent Influence Marketing Council podcast. I think this is a great model to help guide and deepen our thinking about community, marketing, and communication. Each category of channel has different strengths, weaknesses, and expectations.

Broberg’s four categories are:

• Synchronous communication: real time, back and forth, low overhead, casual channels. Slack is a common example, Twitter another.
• Asynchronous communication: channels where a response isn’t expected immediately, people tend to take a little more time to think about responses, it’s a little more formal. Email, listserves, and forums. Matt talked about Discourse as an increasingly popular example of contemporary forums.
• Knowledge base: Where you share, store and access timeless information. Maybe that’s Google Drive, or an intranet. I have a personal wiki I created for myself that I started using PMWiki and I put lots of notes from things I learn there.
• Discovery of new initiatives and developments: I’m going to call this the newsfeed model. Facebook at Work is a good example. I’d love a newsfeed for all my various platforms, updates from co-workers, my wife, machines, etc. This is a powerful type of communication platform, rich with opportunities!

I love this model and want to spend some time thinking about the various channels of communication I participate in, along these lines. Hope you found it useful too. This has been an update to my blog, a communication channel that’s mostly asynchronous, some part knowledge base. Have a nice day.