Back in 2007, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff (of Groundswell fame) introduced Social Technographics, a way to analyse your market’s social technology behaviour.I have to admit that I’ve used it on several occasion when planning a social media campaign on behalf of some of my clients and it is pretty good.

At the heart of Social Technographics is consumer data that looks at how consumers approach social technologies – not just the adoption of individual technologies. Consumers are grouped into different categories of participation – and participation at one level may or may not overlap with participation at other levels. The metaphor of a ladder is used to show this, with the rungs at the higher end of the ladder indicating a higher level of participation.

Forrester research has now firmly established that social technologies have arrived big time. Facebook and Twitter are now the main conversation hives for the most active online social activity (which is why that they are now being aggressively courted by search engines to provide real-time search results).

When Charlene and Josh originally created the Social Technographics ladder of behaviors, they anticipated most categories of social behavior that continue today with one exception: the rapid conversations that take place in tweets and Facebook status updates. To reflect the new behavior, a new rung has been added to the Social Technographics ladder: Conversationalists, a group that starts out with 33% of the online population (compared with 70% who consume social content and 59% who use social networks).

Josh explains:

“Marketers should still analyze the behaviors of their target audiences, but now analyzing markets by segment has become more important. Social Technographics was carefully constructed, not as a segmentation, but as a profile (that is, the groups overlap). That’s because the actual data told me that people participate in multiple behaviors, and not everyone at a higher level on the ladder actually does everything in the lower rungs.”

Forrester has clawed through data for 13 countries and has updated the ladder which you can see below.

Social Technographics: Conversationalists get onto the ladder

Here are three ways you can use it:

1. Convince your boss this stuff is for real, and that if you haven’t jumped on it, you’re late.

2. Profile your customer base, and see what they’re ready for, before planning a project to reach out to them.

3. Segment your audience; build different strategies for different segments.