PLOT: A Social Media Strategy To Make Better Development Decisions

Social media provide a wealth of information that might help technology vendors make better decisions about products and services. To maximize the value of the answers, and the speed with which product managers can find them, Forrester recommends an approach based on people, objectives, strategy, and technology (POST), a general approach for setting overall social media strategy. To address the special challenges that product managers face, this methodology (persona, location, options, and test [PLOT]) identifies the right sources of information needed to choose among development options and increases the odds of making the right conclusions from them. While a big part of this methodology goes beyond the sources themselves, the newness of social media makes it imperative that technology companies understand the relative merits of each potential source of information before jumping to any conclusions.