In our last newsletter, we wrote a little ditty on how a social media strategy should be a logical element of your brand marketing strategy. Logical meaning that first you have to understand who uses which social media channels, how they use it and how frequently.

Now Forrester Research takes a little of the guess work out of the social media strategy with their free Social Technology Profile Tool. It displays social computing habits based on age, gender and country.

“Companies often approach Social Computing as a list of technologies to be deployed as needed — a blog here, a podcast there — to achieve a marketing goal. But a more coherent approach is to start with your target audience and determine what kind of relationship you want to build with them, based on what they are ready for.”

There aren’t huge surprises (it shows younger demographics much more active in social media than older demographics), but the value is in how Forrester breaks users habits into six categories of participation. These six categories are the key to the social media aspect of your brand marketing, or the social media optimization of your current marketing properties.

If you want the full download, I recommend Groundswell. It’s a good social media overview with strategic punch lists of action items so you’ll at least feel like you know what you’re doing.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 at 11:22 am and is filed under PR Bits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.