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How do you profile your customers’ online social behaviors?

Forrester’s “Social Technographics” authors Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff years ago provided a framework to do just that.

The framework looked at a spectrum of groups, from inactives on one side to creators on the other (with spectators, collectors, critics and more in the middle).

Recently the authors refined this profile to better reflect people who actively “converse” via Twitter and Facebook. For any marketing professional interested in the intersection of social media and consumer insights, this profiling approach is a must-read.

Li and Bernoff described the original framework (illustrated using rungs of a ladder) as a way to analyze consumers according to their participation (or not) in social technology.

The updated graphic from the Groundswell blog is shown below:

What does this mean all mean to marketers? More than anything, listen to your customers.  What are they doing? From doing nothing, to reading blogs, to posting ratings, to updating status on Facebook, to publishing content, to actively conversing, Social Technographics provides a new structure you can use to organize and align your planning efforts.

When you consider or refine social media strategies, rethink your current segmentation in light of this new profile information.  What do your top customers look like now? What are they doing in the social arena? How are you interacting with them now? What could you be doing? How could you better reach out to them to close this gap?

As companies further integrate social media into their marketing and communications mix, understanding audiences and consumers outside of traditional segmentation is critical to understanding and building relationships.  Using the rungs of the Social Technographics ladder, Li and Bernoff have outlined a way to quickly help one act on new profiling strategies.