DMN3 Blog

I’ve often written about the importance of understanding your customer as you approach any marketing initiative. It all begins with the customer. Analysts at Forrester Research provide another way to understand your target market in planning any social media marketing campaign.

You can read my previous posts on customer insight:

Customer Insight: Marketing Research You Should Be Doing

Customer Insight: Why a Little Research Pays You Big Dividends

Marketing: It All Begins with Understanding Your Customer

Social Media Marketing for many organizations amounts to deploying a list of social media strategies as needed, e.g., Facebook page, twitter feeds, blog, communities, etc. to achieve a marketing goal. It’s often done with little regard to their target market’s readiness to participate.

Such approaches assume that their customers are all alike when it comes to social media interactions. That’s not the case!

In April of 2007, analysts at Forrester Research introduced Social Technographics, a way to consider your market's social technology behavior.

Organizations planning social media marketing strategies should first analyze their customers “Social Technographics.” The resulting profile will facilitate more effective social media implementation plans.

Knowing the specifics of how your target market engages social media allows a more reasoned approach to social media marketing. You determine what kind of relationship you want to build with your targeted market based on their readiness to engage.

What is Social Technographics?

Social Technographics is based on data about how consumers interact with social media. Forrester Research grouped consumers into six different categories of social media participation. Participation among different categories may overlap, i.e., consumers participate in different behaviors. It is a social media use profile, not a way to segment users.

The profile was expanded to seven different categories in 2010 to accommodate conversational status postings, e.g., Twitter and Facebook.

Forrester used a ladder metaphor to illustrate their view of Social Technographics. Each higher rung on the ladder denotes more engagement with the media.

The current categories include (from least engagement to most engagement):

• Inactives
• Spectators
• Joiners
• Collectors
• Critics
• Conversationalists
• Creators

Inactives: Internet users who do not create, participate or observe.

Spectators: Spectators consume social content including blogs, user-generated video, pod castsn forums, reviews, etc.

Joiners: Joiners connect on social networks like Facebook and Myspace.

Collectors: Collectors organize content for themselves or others by RSS feeds, tagging photos and voting on sites.

Critics: Critics respond to the content of others. They post reviews, comment on blogs, participate in forums and edit wiki articles.

Conversationalists: Conversationalists update their status updates and participates in quick conversations on Twitter and Facebook.

Creators: Creators make social content go. They create blogs or upload video, music, graphics, text, etc.

A sample profile for all online U.S. adults can be seen in the graphic above. The tool below allows you to see a profile based on age and gender for U.S. adults. Forrester offers details profiles based on demographic and buying habits for other market segments. Forrester has done profiles for over a hundred clients, including Walmart shoppers, non-profit donors, doctors, etc.

With the data provided, you can profile your customer base as part of the research and planning phase of your social media campaign. It can also enable you to segment your intended audience along social media engagement.

A single approach to social media today is not the best approach. It’s akin to using a shotgun to do you work when you might be more effective with a rifle targeting different segments with different strategies.

What do you think?