DISQUS

It's true at a certain level that we're all the same, but it's also well established folly for marketers to assume that everything that works in one culture will work in another. It's true that we recognize many things of Tehran as being similar to what we see on a North American street, but we also have to think about what we don't see -- obvious examples would be ads with scantily clan women, or ads for certain kinds of culturally unacceptable food or drink. Vlad's point about smaller places is also important. Cultural sensitivity is important, even without leaving your own national borders. Hell, Burlington Vermont doesn't have as many billboards or lighted signs as most cities its size in the US, because the community standards are different.

It's great that people are starting to realize that we share many things, but we should always be sensitive to the differences as well.

Gents:

First, thanks for the props on the Google AdWords targeting find. Will be interesting to see how effective that is.

Second, I think you might have missed the point of the Forrester tool slightly. As I understand it, it isn't designed to determine your customer demographics, but for you to map your demos on to it to determine potential uptake on a particular SM execution. So for example, Chris as you were noting, your demos are starting to skew a bit older. You could map those demos against the Forrester percentages to see, for example, if a UGC contest made sense based on the percentage of your audience who were up in that Creators rung of the ladder.

The challenge for Forrester will be to continue to update _their_ demos to keep the tool relevant, but personally I think it's the best tool of this type I've seen to provide some third-party data against user behavior, rather than us just guessing what our audience does.