by Michelle Lentz
Groundswell is a book by Forrester Research folks Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. I’ve often read the blog, but because I read just about everything via an RSS feed, I hadn’t poked around on the site. Turns out there’s a pretty nifty tool.
Using their free tool, you can define the basic Social Technographics profile of your customers.
Companies often approach Social Computing as a list of technologies to be deployed as needed — a blog here, a podcast there — to achieve a marketing goal. But a more coherent approach is to start with your target audience and determine what kind of relationship you want to build with them, based on what they are ready for. You can use the tool on this page to get started.
They’ve divided the audience into eight different categories: creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, and inactives. These are all fairly self-explanatory, but there is a nice presentation that specifically defines them.
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