Pickle Jar Communications

Ploughing straight into a social media campaign without first considering where your audience might be and how they are using social media is a little like booking a flight and not knowing where the plane is going to land. Somewhat pointless, and yet a lot of organisations are doing just that. Social and digital media has opened up new and free platforms for them and they therefore think they must be there, regardless of any real consideration about whether their audience is going to be there with them. Think of buying exhibition space at a trade show and turning up to find that there are hundreds of exhibitors but no guests.

I therefore find Forrester’s social technographics profile really help in, if nothing else, challenging my clients to think about where there audience might be online and how they use online tools. It doesn’t provide all the answers, but it prompts the right kind of thinking. Now the nice people at Forrester have made their tool embeddedable, so I thought I’d bring it into my site here:

And here’s their presentation to explain what the different profiles mean in terms of audience use of online tools:

And if you’re looking for more information, I can’t recommend enough that you read their book Groundswell – it’s akin to being my bible.