It can sometimes seem as if all but the most extreme Luddites amongst us spend all day, every day, online using one or more social media channels. Then I’ll be reminded again that isn’t so when savvy, customer-focused clients or colleagues confess quietly that while they themselves don’t use Twitter or Facebook, someone on their board or internal team is saying “all” their customers are using social media now and opportunities are being lost. Or perhaps they were at a business social event, in the physical world, and the conversation focused on the social digital world so much they suddenly felt lost. Whatever the trigger, what I have come to refer to as social media malaise, an uncomfortable feeling your customers may be where you are not, seems to be an increasingly common condition.

Two Free Resources for Social Media Profiles
There are two research-based resources that can help. The Social Profiler tool below is based on data in the Subscribers, Fans & Followers study from email marketer ExactTarget. Twelve distinct social media personas are profiled based on personality and online behaviors rather than simple demographics such as age or gender alone. If you have gathered information from your website over the years on your typical customer’s online behavior patterns, or if you are in a well-tracked consumer product goods category, it is clear pretty quickly to what extent your customer is, or is not, active in social media channels. Play with this a bit, mousing over the spheres to see the various profiles and adjusting age group and gender to match your key customers.

B2B Social Media
If you are in a business-to-business market and your customer is a business rather than a consumer, another resource for social media behaviors comes from the international firm Forrester Research, which has created Social Technographics® Profiles of business decision-makers in the U.S., Europe and Asia.

The original version of Forrester’s Social Technographics Profile ladder with a definition of each behavior type is available on SlideShare.

Social Technographics Explained

By January 2010, the rapid growth of Twitter led to an update to Forrester’s Social Technographics Profile ladder when “Conversationalists” were added as a new profile.

I’ve found most cases of social media malaise can be cured by a little time spent comparing the behaviors described by ExactTarget and Forrester Research to what you already know about your customers. If you see your customers profiled, then it is time to update your marketing strategy and explore adding social media tools to your marketing mix. If you don’t see your customers profiled, then you can share with naysayers the statistic that a solid 17% of American consumers are “inactives,” real live people who do not participate in social media at all.