Technographics to build your social media strategy
Ralf Haller
June 3rd, 2009
Forrester Reserach has been quite active for some time in Social Media research. One of its best contributions is what they call “Technographics” which is essentially analyzing how people, companies, countries etc. use social media. They group us into these categories depending on the degree of our online social activities: Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators, Inactive. The numbers are a percentage of the online community, so only investigate the people who are using the Internet — which makes sense. They have a free tool allowing you to check out at a glance how the U.S., European and Asian countries compare with each other. Asia is far ahead in the usage of social media, while the U.S. and Europe are beginning to show the same usage patterns, with Europe catching up. There is also a B2B tool that looks at companies of different sizes and group by business technology buyers (Software, Hardware, Services, Network and Telecom). The numbers are based on a 2008 survey. When comparing these with the 2007 numbers it becomes evident that social media is spreading very fast.
Tags: Forrester, social communications, social media, Technographics