How to understand your customers’ social behaviours – audience not technology

I blogged last week about the new version of Forrester’s Social Technographics that has just been unveiled.

If you haven’t come across them before, Social Technographics allow you to identify how certain users or segments of users participate in social technologies. As Bernoff explains:

“Social Technographics was carefully constructed, not as a segmentation, but as a profile (that is, the groups overlap). That’s because the actual data told me that people participate in multiple behaviors, and not everyone at a higher level on the ladder actually does everything in the lower rungs.”

Now Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyang (both formerly of Forrester and now at Altimeter) have released a really interesting presentation called ‘Understand your customers behaviours’.

The main thrust of the presentation, the slides and video of which you can see below, is to focus on a thorough understanding of your audience rather than looking at specific technologies or tactics. This is very much our philosophy when putting together PR campaigns at Wildfire, so is great to see it shared in such a clear and detailed way.

Li and Owyang suggest you ask the following questions before embarking on an online campaign:

1. Where are your customers online?
2. What are your customers’ social behaviours online?
3. What social information or people do your customers rely on?
4. What is your customers’ social influence? Who trusts them?
5. How do your customers use social technologies in the context of your products?

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