More social media smartness from Forrester

I saw a tweet from Jeremiah Owyang a couple weeks back (I'd link to it but they're still spackling drywall or something at twitter) promoting a new report from his shop (specifically Josh Bernoff, Charlene Li, Cynthia Pflaum, and Scott Wright) called the POST method - People, Objectives, Strategy and Technology. The intro really resonated with me:

Executives are going about social strategy backwards: picking technologies like blogs or communities first instead of focusing on what they want to accomplish. This document introduces our four-step method for social strategy. First, examine the Social Technographics Profile of your customers. Second, choose your objective: listening to, talking with, energizing, supporting, or embracing your customersand their ideas. Third, build a strategy around changing your relationship with your customers. Finally, pick the appropriate technologies to implement. Companies that take these four steps in order and then put success metrics in place are the most likely to succeed.

The report then goes through an example of how a company (LL Bean) actually paid attention to who it wanted to reach and went about reaching that community using the tools that the community uses - not focusing on a particular technology first and trying to shoehorn a strategy that uses it.

"Social Technographics Profile" sounds a little jargony to me, but I found the report useful. It's similar to the approach I recommend for most clients. It reminded me a bit of the "snackers" meme Jeremiah pushed out there - I actually thought my response to it is pretty much aligned with what they're saying. It also reminded me of the very first post I ever wrote here.

Again, I'm not really a marketing guy, but the concepts still apply.