It takes all kinds to make a business run smoothly, so (appropriately enough) users of enterprise community platforms come in a variety of personalities, passions, and manias. From the over-friendly chatty guy who organizes the American Idol office pool to the brilliant but painfully shy girl on the product engineering team, they all have a place in the grand scheme of things, and no enterprise community would be complete without them.

*Creators—These users sign up for services and groups, troll for interesting articles and repost them, blog, maintain a personal website, load video and/or audio clips, and in general add to the vast amount of consumable content online. You know this girl: she’s the one who blogs about her knitting all the time. She posts pictures of her three disgruntled dobermans wearing knit scarves and hats, is a respected and profitable member of Etsy.com (where she can sell her stuff to others), Tweets about all the softest yarn, and has a strong Facebook following of pictures of her “furmiliated” pets.

Critics—Far from being needlessly critical of everything, these users are the uber-commenters. They post comments to articles, edit and update wikis, and relentlessly rate and review different things online (possibly active in Yelp). This one’s not hard to spot, either. He’s that quiet, kind of nerdy, bespectacled fellow who sits in the first desk by the elevator so he can see all the goings-on. You’ve never actually talked to him, but you know he listens a lot, and if you have a presence online, you’ll certainly know exactly what he does and does not like.

Collectors—These users are relatively rare, as they collect, catalogue, and store reams of useful links to websites, forums, images, articles, and videos, etc. In your enterprise network, this woman is setting herself up to be the next Kevin Rose.

Joiners—Joiners are members of all the newest and hottest social communities. They Tweet how their breakfast settled, strive to reach 1000 friends on Facebook, secretly maintain their MySpace account (though they will wildly deny this if asked directly), join and post on forums and communities, and in general revel in the socially rewarding act of becoming a part of different groups. In all likelihood, this is Bert in Accounting, who organizes all the after work happy hours at the bar down the street, dreams of a company softball team, and lobbies for friendly afternoon poker games once a quarter.

Spectators—In other words, these users are lurkers, though not necessarily in the creepy sense. They carefully read articles and posts, often both enjoying and learning from the experience. They watch videos and may listen to some of those streaming radio stations online. This is most likely that mousy girl from high school who friended you on Facebook but never posts a status update, just logs on a few times a week to see what her community is up to. These people are more comfortable knowing what others are up to and consuming content, but are either uncomfortable putting themselves out there for possible criticism, or are just plain too busy to spend the time to make their voices heard.

Inactives—You all know this guy: he dutifully signed up because all his friends did (or, in the case of enterprise collaboration, the boss told him to), then never returned or only returns rarely. He’s the one who still prints out articles he thinks you might need for your research, and has Joan in HR drop them off on your desk. He is at constant risk of having his accounts shut down due to inactivity. He has probably checked out all the latest networking sites, and may even have signed up for a few, but his profile completeness status constantly hovers around the 30% mark.

In general, what kind of user are you? The uber-commenter or the shy spectator? Have you identified other common types of users? Let us know!

*Source for the common user types: Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff.

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