I swore that I was not going to say anything further. I really, really tried, but I'm going to have to throw away the little plastic medal that says, "Two Weeks And No Buzz." Here's a must-read quote that a colleague forwarded to me:

So why exactly did Google Buzz launch with some key social features missing? Jackson said that while Google employees were testing out the product internally, they never had much desire to mute any of their coworkers, and that their email contact list closely matched the people they wanted to follow on Buzz. Obviously, that wasn’t true for most people once the product was released outside of the Googleplex. Which is why Google is considering pre-releasing new Buzz features to a few thousand opt-in users long before they’re rolled out to the public.

The short version: "It worked for us inside the firewall, so we never thought it'd have a problem outside the firewall." Of course, an enterprise collaboration tool is a wholly different kind of solution than a social networking tool, so the requirements for the former do not completely cover the latter.

In case you wanted to attend tonight's open house on the demographics of B2B technology adoption, here's a pertinent diagram from a recent publication on the subject. As you can see, when they look for information, two people in the same department—an application developer and an enterprise architect—go to very different sources.

• Conclusion 1: Demographics matter. A lot.
• Conclusion 2: If you say that your target customer is developers, you need to take a big product marketing time-out. Not all development professionals are the same. Now march up to your room and think about that.

As important as conclusion 1 may be, it's not exactly profound. Sure, we all know that people are different, but what are the significant differences? And how should these variations affect the way we market our technology to rank-and-file developers versus the fancy-pants enterprise architects?

Many efforts at persona development break down at the very beginning, with the question, How many different personas do I need? There's no obviously correct answer to that question, especially when you haven't seen the data that indicates which demographic differences are significant, and which aren't. (Leaving aside the practical question of how many personas you can actually produce.)

Actually, I should say, welcome to the Forrester community. The revamped blogs are one facet of Forrester's investment in social media as the conduit for two-way conversation with clients and non-clients alike.

One obvious change: Browsing around, you can easily access an analyst's individual blog, or the role blog, or the client group's blog, or everyone's Forrester blog. As brilliant as I think my own posts are, my colleagues often have much smarter things to say than I do. Please take advantage of the new way to browse through the conversations happening across Forrester. (But come back here when you're done.)

Now, I really do need a better picture...

The more social we get, the more we expose about ourselves. That's a fact of life that antedates social media, the Internet, or computers. From this perspective, social media are just a new way to  reveal ourselves, sometimes by choice, other times not.