POST Methodology
August 13, 2009
I have read a lot about it and use it when creating social web strategy and I wanted to pass it along. The POST methodology was developed by Forrester (a large research company that I have personally used)and it really is a four step approach to a social web strategy.
P: People
O: Objectives
S: Strategy
T: Technology
Getting into the social web really needs to be about the message, not the medium so this helpful acronym helps to jump start the planning.
It helps you by forcing you to evaluate your audience first and really forces you to define who it is you are trying to reach. Knowing your audience makes you really dive into thinking about where your audience communicates and how they prefer to be talked to. Then you will need to define your objectives, are you talking to this group of people or are you just trying to listen to them? Having a narrow objective makes it easier to set goals and then define measure against them. The strategy element really delves into what you are hoping to change and the technology helps explain how you will get there. Notice that technology is the last step, not the first. Coming to the table with the attitude of "we want a Facebook" or "we want to be on Twitter" is a goal that is setting yourself up for failure. The technology part is easy if you know who you want to talk to, what you hope to achieve, and what will be different after the engagement.
The above linked to blog article from Forrester's Josh Bernoff goes into a lot more detail about how to utilize POST. I really recommend checking it out and doing a little bit more research into the POST methodology.
