As the newest addition to the Market Insights team, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Lindsey Colella, and I recently joined Forrester as a Senior Community Manager.

It is a pleasure to “meet” all of you, and I look forward to many future interactions and discussions regarding market research. My background is in qualitative research and, in particular, cultivating insights through online community management. I take great pleasure in showing clients the value of qualitative and online community research and bringing them to a new level in understanding consumer behavior.

As some of you may know, Forrester runs its own online research community for two purposes — to conduct proprietary research as well as to run custom client research projects, both of which I manage. Our proprietary research is a monthly document called Community Speaks that discusses trends in consumer behavior. This product provides a unique offering because I work closely with expert analysts who provide additional insight around the findings.

As an example, I published a document last month covering how brands should engage consumers via social networking sites. A key finding from this report is that for a brand, earning a “like” is in fact the easy part but keeping that “like” is even harder. The key to maintaining a “like” from consumers is to provide information and promotional offers that relate to their interests. As one of our community members shares:

“I have unliked a lot of brands lately. There are just too many on Facebook to like. I try to limit liking brands that I actually use and interact with often and would benefit from learning more about that brand.”

My colleague Reineke Reitsma and I have been championing mobile market research for quite some time. In fact, we published the first Forrester report on this emerging and innovative methodology back in 2009. In the report, Reineke wrote about the value of its mobility and flexibility to gather insights into consumers’ behavior anytime and anywhere. And for mainstream adoption to occur, hurdles such as cost, technology, privacy, and representation must be addressed.

At that time, I thought the growth of mobile market research was soon upon us. I was off by about 2 years. But 2011 was a turning point for mobile market research. We started 2011 with seeing the number of global shipments of smartphones and tablets surpassing the global shipment of desktop and notebook PCs. Blog posts and Twitter chatter under the #mobilemr hashtag increased significantly. In July 2011 there was the first formal debate about the merits of this new technology. And also in July there was a conference completely dedicated to how early adopters have leveraged mobile market research.

Last month George Colony, CEO of Forrester, talked about a “Social Thunderstorm” at the LeWeb conference in Paris. He argued that social is running out of hours and running out of people. What does that mean? Well, the second one is easy: The vast majority of consumers around the world who have access to a computer use social media. And the first one? George goes on to say that Americans are spending more time on social media than volunteering, praying, talking on the phone, emailing, or even exercising.

With so many people spending so much time on social media, it is crucial for companies to understand how their customers use social media. We just released our newest report, Social Media Adoption In 2011, which reveals the latest trends.

The report illustrates how consumers are using social media by applying our Social Technographics® global classification system. The graphic below illustrates this framework. We classify consumers into seven groups based on online activities, and consumers can fall into several different groups. Only Inactives are an exclusive group.

In the current time of digital disruption, market insights professionals need to know the market their organization plays in well enough to identify the “adjacent possible” but also to understand how receptive their customers are to new offerings. With that in mind, I’ve taken a fresh look at Forrester’s Technographics® segmentation. This segmentation is built on three main components: motivation, income, and technology optimism/pessimism using a proprietary algorithm and is created in 1997 when we first began collecting our Technographics® data to help companies understand and predict changes in the consumer technology landscape. In 1999, Forrester published a book, called 'Now or Never', that covered how companies should use the model. 

Recently I was wondering: does the segmentation still hold for current technologies like tablets and can it still help companies understand and predict technology behaviors? For this, I analyzed tablet uptake as well as buying intention of tablet from one of our European surveys by segment: