POST Model
People first, technology last—a strategic framework for social media that actually works.
In 2007, when every company was jumping into social media without a plan, Forrester gave the world an antidote to chaos. POST wasn't about tools or tactics—it was about thinking in the right order. Understand your people first. Define objectives second. Build strategy third. Choose technology last. It forced discipline on an industry drunk on novelty.
People
Assess your customers' social activities. Who are they? How do they already behave online?
Forrester developed Social Technographics—a ladder of participation that categorizes people as Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators, or Inactives. Start here. You can't build a strategy for people you don't understand. If your audience doesn't blog, don't build a blog strategy. If they're heavy social networkers, meet them there.
Objectives
Decide what you want to accomplish. What's the business goal?
Forrester identified five core objectives: Listening (research and insights), Talking (spreading messages), Energizing (mobilizing advocates), Supporting (helping customers help themselves), and Embracing (integrating customer input into operations). Pick one. Maybe two. But don't try to do all five at once. Objectives drive everything downstream.
Strategy
Plan for how relationships with customers will change. What's the approach?
This is where you map the path from current state to desired state. How will you shift customer relationships? What resources do you need? Who owns it internally? What's the timeline? Strategy is about the choices you'll make—and the tradeoffs you'll accept. It's the connective tissue between objectives and execution.
Technology
Choose the technology and tactics that enable the strategy. Tools come last.
Only after you understand your people, your objectives, and your strategy should you choose platforms—Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, forums, communities. Technology is the means, not the end. The biggest mistake companies made in 2008 was starting here. POST reversed that. It put technology in its proper place: as an enabler, not a strategy.
The genius of POST is the sequence. Most companies started with technology and worked backward. POST forced you to think forward: people → objectives → strategy → technology. It's a forcing function for strategic clarity in a space drowning in tactical noise.
Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff developed the POST methodology at Forrester Research in 2007 as part of their groundbreaking work on social computing. It was formally introduced in their 2008 book "Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies," published by Harvard Business Press.
At the time, Forrester was conducting extensive research on how consumers were adopting social technologies. Li and Bernoff saw companies making the same mistake repeatedly: launching Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and blogs without understanding why or for whom. POST gave them a systematic framework to plan social strategies properly.
The book became a BusinessWeek bestseller and won the American Marketing Association's Berry-AMA Book Prize. POST became the standard methodology taught in business schools and adopted by Fortune 500 companies worldwide. It remains relevant because the underlying logic—understand people before picking platforms—is timeless.
2007-2008: Peak Social Media Chaos. Facebook had just opened to the public in 2006. Twitter launched in 2006. YouTube was barely two years old. Companies were experiencing what Li and Bernoff called "Web 2.0 approach-avoidance syndrome"—simultaneously excited and terrified. Everyone felt pressure to "do social media" but nobody knew how.
The Technology-First Trap. Companies were building Facebook pages because competitors had Facebook pages. They were launching blogs because someone read that blogs were important. They were jumping on MySpace (remember MySpace?) without any understanding of whether their customers were even there. Strategy came after tactics, if it came at all.
Forrester's Data Advantage. Li and Bernoff had something most consultants didn't: rigorous consumer research data. Their Social Technographics profiles were based on surveys of thousands of consumers across demographics and geographies. They could prove that not all audiences behaved the same way online. A 50-year-old executive didn't use social media like a 22-year-old college student. This seems obvious now. It wasn't then.
The Groundswell Insight. The book's core thesis was that a fundamental power shift had occurred. Customers were talking to each other at scale, outside corporate control. Companies could ignore this, fight it, or harness it. POST was the framework for the third option—not controlling the conversation, but participating in it strategically.
Why It Endures. Fifteen years later, the platforms have changed but the logic hasn't. POST works because it forces the right question at the right time. Before you pick TikTok or LinkedIn or Instagram, ask: who are my people, what do I want to achieve, and how will this change our relationship? The acronym is dated. The thinking is timeless.