I attended a luncheon today sponsored by the Internet Strategy Forum. The invited guest was Forrester‘s Josh Bernoff. Josh’s topic was “Winning in a world transformed by social media.” He cautioned the audience to not focus on technologies, but rather relationships and the prevailing deeper social trends creating the “groundswell.” Bernoff describes the groundswell as a “social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other rather than from traditional institutions.”
His presentation was chock full of popular social media/community examples, many of which I’d seen before, but always interesting to see in aggregate. He also outlined how to approach the exercise in leveraging the groundswell with tips on setting objectives, understanding roles, measuring success with metrics, building a business case, etc. The high point of the presentation for me was his discussion related to what Forrester calls, “Social Technographics.” It’s basically a graphic representation of where customers are on the social media activity ladder. Additionally, Forrester claims to have analytical data that will profile your target customers’ social computing patterns by age, country, and gender (that map to the activity ladder). Check out the profile tool. Would be interested to know how they built this tool, but have to admit, it’s kinda fun.
Slides explaining the Social Technographics ladder:
All of this and more is explained in the Groundswell book. You can get more resources at the Groundswell site.
Thanks for the mention — hope people enjoyed the talk.
Not my favorite picture of all time 😉
Susan,
Thanks for the post about the Internet Strategy Forum meeting in Austin recently. We are glad that so many local people were able to attend and that you found some value.
The Internet Strategy Forum is a professional association for corporate Internet strategists/managers and our members come from both marketing and IT departments. Since your link in the post goes directly to the Austin chapter page, I thought I would provide a link to the home page for those who might be interested in joining: http://www.internetstrategyforum.org.
I enjoyed Josh’s presentation as well. I especially liked the “snausages” story, a great example of using social media for product development. And thanks for posting the link to the profile tool, it’s pretty cool!