My experience has suggested that people are all over the place, as you say. They might read a blog on their favorite topic of food and not even think about it as being a blog…while that is sophisticated behavior Social Technographics-wise it really doesn’t say anything about the person…merely that they found the site and liked the content there.

So yes, as a rough instrument it can be a good conversation starter, and as I get older I realize that this is important on the team level. But I really don’t see how one can make tactical decisions with it…given that it’s such a broad tool and that all the data is self-reported in the first place. (that’s the bigger problem with most of Forrester’s data)

Great question about the Technographics stuff. I’ve tried to write about before and failed.

Instruments like the Social Technographics Profile always have to oversimplify. There’s not enough sense of grain in recency and frequency – doing different activities once per month versus a hundred times a day. There’s also not enough clarity about motivations and how they differ across groups. Finally, it implies that people grow up the ladder – they start by listening and some of them eventually get to the top.

That’s wrong because some people start elsewhere in the ladder and then move up or down. Some people are all things in the ladder at once. Others start in one rung and basically stay there forever.

However, I think it has a lot of value as a rough instrument. Knowing, in a given demographic, whether it seems like that population is more active or less active than the overall net population in a given category can be useful. The way they use it in the discussion in groundswell is relevant here – helps determine how a business should go after different audiences.

Of course, more detailed stats on user actions on your own site – your actual customers, not a demographically balanced panel, combined with user testing and user feedback – beats broad brush demographics anyway.

Since you asked the question, what were your concerns about the technographics profile stuff?

I look forward to whatever her next venture will be and will keep clued into her blog, but I’ll pass on the book this time around.

A while back Josh Bernoff offered a free report about Social Technographics to bloggers, and I grabbed it, but I didn’t end up reviewing it on my blog because I had several problems with it. I decided at the time that it was better in that case to not write anything than to write a negative review…

So I’m curious, did the methodology strike you in any way?