Personas and Social Technographics
May 1st, 2007 by Doug Reynolds
One of the tools we use to define and understand demographics is the Persona. For interactive media the Persona is most valuable when it reveals not just where someone is consuming information, but how and why they use that information to make a buying decision. The shift from traditional demographic data to user-centric, information gathering Personas is a large part of what helps our teams develop brand experiences that engage an audience in a dialog about their particular needs. The end result are campaigns that foster a level of trust and brand association that moves the sales process.
Social media is an exciting part of the goal to engage an audience with a brand, but the “launch a campaign and hope for the best” approach is enough to keep you up at night. Social media consumption habits are part of a well-defined Persona and help teams find innovative ways to keep people engaged. Just as important is the ability to measure success with social media. Forrester recently published a report on social technographics that looks at how people engage with social media – from creation to disinterest. A CIO, for example, may be more likely to collect content from the social media space and less likely to create original content. Represented as a ladder, the model serves to focus a social media strategy on moving an audience from inactive consumer of social media to content creator (someone who contributes to a blog, uploads videos, or maintains a web page). It’s an interesting model and its yet another dimension of measuring the success of a social media campaign.
May 3rd, 2007 at 4:16 pm
Good comments, and I appreciate the introduction to the Charlene Li report. I think Forrester’s move to characterize the levels and types of participation (not just the volume) in social media is an important one. We could use the same kind of analysis for business and technical decision-makers.