by Charlene Li

Josh and I will be doing a free webinar “Groundswell: A Framework For Using Web 2.0 For Business Advantage” on Friday, May 9th at 8am PT / 11am ET / 5pm CET.

We'll be reviewing the core ideas laid out in our "Groundswell" book, going through the frameworks and strategies needed to approach and thrive in the groundswell.

We hope you can join us -- and invite your colleagues if you think they would benefit!

Agenda:

• What process should companies use to create social strategies?
• What business objectives can be achieved with Web 2.0 technologies?
• How should you get started? 

Click here to be registered for the Groundswell webinar

by Josh Bernoff

Some of you like to read. Some don't. So we arranged to bring Groundswell out as an audiobook.

You can download it to your computer or iPod from Audible.com or iTunes. Now you can master social applications in the gym, or while commuting.

The audiobook includes nearly everything that's in the text, except for some of the figures and the notes. It's about 8 hours long. If you're looking for the CD version, that will be out this fall.

Some people who know me have said they could hear my voice as they read the text of the book. You don't need to wonder any more -- that really is my voice on this audiobook. I spent 15 hours in a recording studio on this. It is an interesting experience to record what you have written -- it was like reliving the experiences of the people we interviewed. The trick is to be interesting without being too dramatic. You'll have to let me know if I succeeded.

Here are are a few samples.

From the introduction (5 minutes, with both Charlene and me, introduces the book).

From Chapter 1 (16 minutes, introduces the idea and then gets you all charged up).

From Chapter 12 (4 minutes, Stormhoek Winery living in the Groundswell, some of my best writing).

If you want to embed these on your site go here.

by Josh Bernoff

In today's post we're showing off our international data capabilities with some data about participation in creating and consuming content in different geographies. This is the first table in Chapter 2 of Groundswell.

I find it amazing what a high degree of variability there is in this data. Note that this reflects percentage of online consumers only. These surveys were done between March and September of 2007.

The blog readership and commenting numbers in Japan and South Korea area astounding. I believe this is where North America is going. I'm at a loss to explain the relatively low level of participation in Germany  and the UK -- any ideas on why this is happening? In the UK, I don't know of any cultural reason why online participants should be reticent to read blogs -- I expect this to reach par with the US (or it may already have done so).

It's an interesting pattern that approximately half of those who read blogs comment on them, with somewhat fewer writing. I'd love to know why readership of blogs is higher in Japan, but writing blogs is more common in South Korea.

The US is the clear leader in both creation and viewing of user-generated video, which is at least partly due to the fact that YouTube is mostly in English. (I refuse to believe we have more idiots making idiotic video in the U.S. -- we don't have a way to survey that!) Given the very high bandwidth available in Japan and Korea I would have expected higher participation there -- is this cultural, or is it because there is more production quality video (on-line television) in these geographies?

Podcasts still haven't caught on the US after years of availability. And they're non-existent in Korea. I am skeptical that these numbers will increase significantly in the U.S. or that other parts of the world will surpass the U.S. number.

One note: we use different survey methodologies around the world (for example, what you see here came from mail surveys in Europe and online surveys in the U.S.) Also, the surveys were not taken in the same month. So direct comparisons are subject to significant variation that's not explained by geography.

If you found this data interesting, you can learn more. We have social technographic profiles from around the world available free. And clients can get access to all of our survey data.

by Josh Bernoff

Even thought it's actually been available for a weeks, today is the "official" publication date for Groundswell. That means it's in stores all over the US and on iTunes and Audible as an audiobook.

We created this book to help people take advantage of the social computing trend. But is it actually useful? Only you can answer that question -- and we'd like to hear your answers.

We love bloggers reviewing the book, but you may not have a blog, or have time to write a few paragraphs. So why not make it easy. Twitter your review.

Start your review with "@Groundswell" and keep it to 140 characters. Why? Because it enforces some discipline on your thinking. And because it makes it easier for the rest of us to read all the reviews.

If you're not on Twitter, you can certainly write a 140 character review in the comments below.

Or you can leave it on our wall at Facebook.

Want to see what others are tweeting, use this Summize link or this Tweetscan.

(If you haven't read the book, what are you waiting for? Buy it here or here.)

Around May 15 we'll highlight the most interesting ones in a post on this blog, and we'll be retweeting them from @Groundswell on Twitter.

Looking forward to hearing your ideas!

We continue our relentless drive to bring Groundswell ideas to you, whatever event you're attending. In May you can meet us at:

Thursday, May 1, 12:00 pm (eastern)
Young Presidents Organization Teleseminar

Half Moon Bay, California
Wednesday, May 7, 10:45 am (pacific) Ziff Davis CIO Summit
Charlene is on a panel "Web 2.0 and the CIO - Raising the Collaborative Intellect of Your Enterprise"

Beverly Hills, California
Thursday, May 8, 10:00 am (pacific) INMA World Congress
Charlene is giving a speech "Social Networking and Digital Migration: How Newspapers Can Position Themselves for Growth"

Las Vegas
Tuesday, May 13, 8:45 am (pacific) Community 2.0 
Charlene is giving a speech "Tapping Into the Groundswell: How To Create Your Community Strategy"

New York
Wednesday, May 14, 9:40 am (eastern) Avenue A/Razorfish Client Event
Charlene is giving a speech.

New York
Thursday, May 15, 5:15 pm (eastern) MIT Enterprise Forum
Josh is giving a speech about Groundswell.

New York
Friday, May 16, 8:30 am (eastern) Corporate Communication and Technology Conference
Josh is on a panel, "Using Web 2.0 to Deliver Business Results."

San Francisco Bay Area
Friday, May 16, 6:30 pm (pacific) Society For New Communications Research "Third Thursday"
Charlene Li will give a speech about Groundswell.

Boston
Tuesday, May 20, 8:00 am (eastern) MITX and Avenue A | Razorfish event
Josh is on a panel presenting ideas about the digital outlook for 2008.

Boston
Thursday, May 22, 8:00 am (pacific) Mass Technology Leadership Council Breakfast
Josh will give a speech on ideas from Groundswell.

Austin
Thursday, May 29, 12:00 pm (central) Internet Strategy Forum 
Josh will give a speech on ideas from Groundswell.

Austin
Friday, May 30, 12:00 pm (central) Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Summit 
Josh will give a speech on "Turning the Social    Technology Groundswell to Your Advantage."

(Looking at this schedule, I sure am glad there are two of us!)

by Josh Bernoff

For today's weekly data chart we'll look at a different kind of data for a change -- not a Social Technographics Profile but some attitudinal data that's highlighted in Groundswell. Today's question is: whom do you trust?

As you can see, 83% trust the word of a friend. But perhaps one of the more interesting points is that the number who trust consumer reviews by people they never met on a retailer's site (like eBags, the example in Groundswell) is 60%, only slightly lower than "a review by a known expert."

Why do people trust strangers?

They don't, not as individuals. But they do in groups. Strangers are assumed not to have an axe to grind. If 100 people on eBags say a laptop bag is great, then it is great. If they say it's inferior, then it is inferior. Regardless of what a so-called "expert" might say.

What does this mean for your brand?

It means that a focus on "influencers" is not enough. You never know who may be reviewing your product, or where. Influencers may touch a lot of people, but so do the masses of reviewers on Yelp, or Amazon.com, or TripAdvisor. And heaven forbid you get people talking about your brand on The Consumerist.

If most of your customers like you, the lesson is this: help them to talk. Install ratings and reviews on your site. Create a blog and let them respond. Give them online tools and energize them. And embrace the fan groups they form on social networks. Fan the flames.

What if your customers don't like you? Shutting them up is not an option. My only useful case study for this is Dell, which (1) started to seek out bloggers who were complaining and solved their problems to make them happier and (2) actually improved their customer service. That's expensive. But if you're in a cutthroat market it's required.

Frankly, I don't have a completely satisfactory answer, so I'm throwing it open to you. What should a company with a poor customer reputation do about social media? Join the discussion about it on our discussion board.

by Josh Bernoff

There’s a fundamental contradiction at the heart of groundswell strategy.

We’ve told you that it’s a big error to treat everyone in the groundswell as if they were the same. That’s why we find the beehive metaphor inappropriate. People’s contributions are as different as they are.

On the other hand, corporate development for the last 50 years, at least, has been an ongoing search for efficiency. Mass production means cranking out the same product a hundred thousand times at a high degree of quality. Advertising succeeds by giving the same message to everybody. Customer support representatives read from the same script, because the company can’t treat employees as interchangeable unless they treat customers the same way.

As a result, to many of our corporate clients, groundswell strategy seems like a step backwards. “You want us to deal with people as individuals?” they say. “We spent the last 30 years computerizing everything so we can avoid just that!” 

Here’s the secret. When you start a groundswell project, you will be treating people as individuals. But very soon, you’ll be able to get economies of scale. How? By enlisting those same customers.

For example, Dell told us (the story’s in Chapter 8 of Groundswell) that when they started their most recent support forum, 1999, they knew they’d need moderators. They pulled 30 support reps off the phones and converted them into forum moderators. Those support reps answered questions online, just as they had been on the phone.

Already, Dell was getting more efficiencies, since each answer could be read by dozens or hundreds of other people searching for it on their support forum.

Now, five years later, the support forum is many times larger than it was then. And the number of moderators is no longer 30. It’s five. And that’s because the members of the community are moderating it themselves. 

It’s the same in marketing applications. You seek out influencers – bloggers or key people in discussion forums. You connect with them, treat them as important. And they spread your messages into forums that echo and react to those messages, hundreds of times.

Cymfony monitors brand chatter. But the result isn’t just a number – it’s sentiment, together with specific posts you want to pay attention to. MotiveQuest does the same along dozens of dimensions. You don’t have to deal with individuals, but you can, if you determine there are some who deserve your attention.

So as you seek corporate scale economies in groundswell applications, remember these principles.

1. As applications grow, economies appear. Seek them out. You’ll need them to deal with a huge application.

2. Use members of the community to moderate, regulate, and manage the community. It makes them feel good, and it saves you time. This is how Wikipedia became so huge. Every discussion forum and Facebook group has people like this – recruit them and empower them. (And they nearly always work for free!)

3. Use technology where possible. Visible Technologies finds the influencers in your market. Salesforce.com’s idea software lets you turn your customers into an innovation engine. Vendors are springing up all over to solve these problems – paying them is cheaper than hiring people.

4. Don’t avoid the exceptions, seek them out. You’ll learn more from them than from the “masses” – they’re the creative ones. They can make the most trouble, or generate the most positive energy, depending on how you treat them.

This is just a start, but you get the idea. Feel free to add your own scale principles in the comments.

by Josh Bernoff

As we continue to promote Groundswell ahead of this week's formal launch at the Web 2.0 Expo, an amazing thing is happening.

We really do feel like we're becoming part of a conversation.

The simplest way to see this is to do a Tweetscan of "groundswell." You get a few extraneous tweets, but in general you'll see what people are saying -- and in general they're exciting to be finding the book, buying the book, and reading the book. (Except for Shannon Whitely who put it down for a second and somebody swiped it.)

I'll highlight a few bits here from the blogosphere. First of all, several bloggers have taken us up on our offer to interview the authors. From Guy Kawasaki's interview with me:

Question: Many experts cite Dell Hell, Comcast rep sleeping, etc. as cataclysmic occurrences, but Dell Hell didn't cause Dell's issues, and Dell is substantially back. Comcast is still around, and it gives me 25 megabit Internet access in my house.

Answer: Dell Hell was actually a wakeup call -- Dell is substantially back in part because it has learned to listen better to its customers. They should thank Jeff Jarvis for waking them up. As for Comcast, it's paying millions to run commercials about how Comcastic it is, but if you go to YouTube and search Comcast the first result is the sleeping technician. In part, those commercials are paying to undo that YouTube video.

From Lee Odden's interview with Charlene:

Question: Clever and nimble companies that have successfully leveraged the internet and marketing online have become formidable alternatives to larger, legacy competitors. It would seem that those companies that can best adapt to and engage social technologies like blogging, reviews, social networking and media will gain even more of an advantage. What advice do you have for companies with a “wait and see” perspective?

Answer: Don’t wait too long! Some companies think that they can wait until the technology is “proven” or when it becomes “safer” to engage. They want ample “proof” that these technologies work and that there is a proven ROI associated with these efforts. I think it’s a cop out, a way to dismiss these technologies as experimental and early, rather than taking a closer, deeper look to understand the power they bring Adapting these new technologies is really, really hard work, so any company that does have a “wait and see” attitude is going to behind the curve in another year or two.

We'd love to do more of these! You ask very good questions.

Our reviews have been overwhelmingly, embarrassingly positive, including five 5-star reviews on Amazon. (If you've ready the book and you like it, write us a review!) Our simple advice to get good reviews: write a good book, then encourage people who read it to review it. To Larry Weber, who wrote in his review that we were late to the party, I'd respond that we seem to be in time to help an awful lot of people who are calling us from companies all over the place.

We keep a running feed on reviews from the blogosphere. Here are a few of my favorites (I've tried to pick the most interesting, not just the nice stuff they said). Bloggers -- if I haven't included yours, we noticed you, just don't have room for everybody. And if you've read the book but haven't written a review, there is certainly room for opinions!

Customers Rock: I agree with Charlene and Josh - the most important part of engaging in the groundswell is setting objectives.  There are too many companies out there trying to “do social media” just because their competitors are doing it.  Groundswell will help your company take the right perspective and set the right priorities.

FaceReviews: This might prove an eye opening read for people that think social technologies are a fad. It will be an eye opening whack on the side of the head moment for many people that think that these social technologies will not/ can not impact their business.

Whatsnextblog: If you read this blog with any regularity, you know I don't gush. Rant yes, gush no. But I'm gushing about Groundswell. Order it now, today. Get out your magic marker and your sticky notes, and go sit in a corner and read this book. [OK, that's just flat-out praise, but how could resist.]

Marketing & Strategy Innovation Blog: Over and over, Li and Bernoff emphasize the need, when using these technologies, to listen, and not to shout. To be transparent, and to be authentic. Whether this is possible with traditional companies, in which desiring to control the message is deeply ingrained, remains to be seen.

Inside the Marketer's Studio: Forrester Research's Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff is the best book on social media I've ever read, and it may be the best book ever written on the subject. . . . Is the book perfect? Not quite. My biggest complaint is that it doesn't dive deep enough into what goes wrong and how some campaigns could have been better.  [We tired hard to get more of those failures into the book, but people really don't want to talk about them!]

Finally, for those of you that are more audio-visually oriented, here's a podcast interview with Charlene from Nick O'Neill of Social Times and a video of both of us, at Forrester's Marketing Forum, with Rodney Rumford.

by Josh Bernoff

In Groundswell we promised to invite you to join the discussion.

Our discussion forum is now up and running. We'd love your participation. We're kicking this off as a place where businesspeople can help solve each others' problems in creating, implementing, managing, and promoting social applications.

We've added some topics to start things off -- if you'd like to see more, comment there or on this post.

by Josh Bernoff

Since we've been talking about Groundswell we've developed a base of fans and followers. Just like the fans of your brand they are a creative and powerful force. And also just like the fans of your brand, they make you ask yourself what you really stand for.

On Friday, we noticed that one of those fans, Chris Lynn from SocialTNT, had created a blog post and a quiz called "Discover your Groundswell Social Technographics Profile."

Our first reaction was delight. But your fans don't always do things the way you expect. I have to say, this quiz is terrific -- Chris really does seem to have gotten inside the different categories that make up Social Technographics in a very clever way. But of course, it's not identical to the way we do things. In particular, we have a precise set of questions that define Social Technographics -- his are more whimsical. And we determined, after scrutinizing masses of global data, that this is not a segmentation -- people fit into more than one category. Chris, in contrast, gives you a badge for the category you fit into best (although he shows your other tendencies on his charts, too).

Chris is doing a great thing by spreading the word about Social Technographics with these badges – but he’s also building on and modifying our intellectual property. That’s the challenge: how comfortable are we at Forrester with this? There is always the possibility that Chris' quiz will confuse people who may think he's affiliated with us. But after some thought, we realized that we need to embrace Chris and his ideas, since that is, after all, what we say in the book. Your brand belongs to your customers.  He and the rest of our fans are a lot more likely to generate interest for us than to create confusion.

There are limits. Technographics is a trademark of Forrester Research and the content of Groundswell is our intellectual property. We are not giving blanket permission for people to take our intellectual property and do whatever they want with it. Yet ultimately we want to respect and celebrate instances when our fans are energized to make our brands their own.

We’re going through the same tough soul-searching that all companies will need to do. It’s a journey that will take time and experience, and we expect to make mistakes along the way. But we’ll get there, with the help and patience of our fans. And if we can take this journey, you can, too.

In the meantime, take his quiz. It will make you think.

by Josh Bernoff

The community folks at Mzinga/Prospero have hired me to do a Webinar. It's free to attendees, and will cover community best practices.

If you're interested, sign up here. I'm looking forward to speaking with you.

It's Wednesday, 16 April, at 2:00 PM eastern time (11am pacific).

by Josh Bernoff

As we distributed copies of Groundswell at Forrester's Marketing Forum in Los Angeles this week, several people asked an interesting question: how did you get started with the book?

This made me think back to when we did get started, in December of 2006. And I think we did this a little differently from how most books get written.

We didn't start with an outline, or even an idea. We started with a need.

Charlene and I sat in a conference room together with a PC connected to a projector and, together, composed what we thought of as the back-of-the-book copy. You know, what you expect to pick up and read to tell you what the book is good for. That copy described, in fairly vivid terms, what the Groundswell trend was, and how the book would help you to deal with it.

In fact, it was in writing that copy that the word "Groundswell" arose. It was in the middle of a sentence, but Charlene and I both started looking at it and said, "Hmm, that's a powerful word. We could make that the title." So we did.

That marketing copy appeared again in the proposal we showed to publishers including the one we picked, Harvard Business press. They liked it. And it drove the whole project.

I'm reminded of the scene in Woody Allen's "Sleeper" in which he purports to be preparing to clone a person from his nose. He puts the nose on a person-shaped table in the nose position and says something like "we're going to clone him right up under the nose here." We, essentially, built the book up right under the marketing copy.

Engineers will recognize this process as being like creating a functional spec before writing software or building hardware.

In the end, we feel the book did meet the promises we made 17 months ago. And the marketing copy on the book flap is almost identical to what we wrote back then.

On a project of this intensity it sure helped to know where we were going. Clarity of purpose not only inspires you, it inspires your coworkers and and partners. Try it yourself. Next time you are developing a new product, write the marketing copy first, not the product description. It will keep you honest.

P.S. Here is the marketing copy in its final form:

A groundswell is rising. Are you ready?

Right now, your customers are writing about your products on blogs and recutting your commercials on YouTube. They're defining you on Wikipedia and ganging up on you on social networking sites like Facebook. These are all elements of a social phenomon -- the groundswell -- that has created a permanent shift in the way the world works. Most companies see it as a threat.

You can see it as an opportunity.

In Groundswell two top analysts from Forrester Research show you how to turn the force of customers connecting to your own advantage. With twenty-five vivid cases from around the world -- from health care to retail to consumer goods to business services -- Li and Bernoff show how leading companies are gaining insights, generating revenue, saving money, and energizing their own customers. Whether you're in marketing, research, support, sales, development, or even running the whole enterprise, there's targeted advice here for you, backed up with real-world ROI to prove it works.

Groundswell is based on hard consumer data and experience with dozens of companies. You'll see how the marketers of Procter & Gamble proved that subtle marketing within a community was four times as effective as television, how Best Buy taps into the intelligence of over a thousands of its own employees with its own social network, how Dell has transformed itself by embracing customer insights in nearly every department, and how a South African winery boosted its sales tenfold by tapping into the power of bloggers, YouTube, Facebook, and every other tool of the social technology arsenal.

You can't ignore this trend. Read Groundswell and learn how to ride the wave. There's no going back.

by Josh Bernoff

Concurrent with the release of Groundswell, I've begun writing a column in Marketing News, the magazine of the American Marketing Association. I'll share these columns with you as a regular blog feature.

Here's the column from the April 1 issue. If you're reading Groundswell, you'll recognize these three people from Chapter 3.

Are Your Customers Ready For Social Applications?

As I take over this column from my colleague Brian Kardon, I thought I’d start by challenging you with a question I ask all the marketers we work with at Forrester Research: do you know what your customers are doing? Do you know whether they’re active with social applications? How active?

Most marketers I speak with don’t know. And that’s partly because the question is pretty complicated.

I recently saw a vivid application of this as I investigated how the Lego company markets its products to adults. Lego makes most of its sales to kids, but Tormod Askildsen, a senior executive there, recently told me he estimates that 5% to 10% of the company’s sales go to adults – the so-called AFOLs, or adult fans of Legos. AFOLs have a thriving online community going at LUGNET.com (that’s the Lego User Group Network).

I recently met three of these AFOLs at a model train show, where they were showing off an incredible Lego town and train model they had created. And as I interviewed them, I could see in microcosm how their participation reflects the varied elements that make up social media.

Eric Kingsley was the most active of all the AFOLs I met on social networks. He posts frequently and uploads photos to LUGNET and maintains three Web sites, two of which are dedicated exclusively to Lego. He’s a major force in the Lego community.

Joe Comeau, another AFOL, buys $4,000 of Lego a year. But his online contribution tends more toward reacting to the contributions of others, in forums, for example. “When someone comes up with a new idea, you build upon it,” he told me. “Before you know it, you are building at a level far surpassing what you ever thought of.”

Linda Dallas, a quiet woman who recently married another member of the local group (their centerpieces were Legos), reads the online postings and forums avidly, but rarely makes contributions of her own.

If you were Tormod Askildsen, you would need to pay attention to all three of these types of customers. In every communication, you need to think not just of the Eric Kingsleys, who will take your messages and spread them far and wide, but to the Joe Comeaus who will react to those messages, and the Linda Dallases, who will read and be influenced by them.

Let’s take a look at what this means in your world.

In the United States, as of about 6 months ago, 56% of all online consumers had participated in some sort of social application in the last month. (This comes from an online survey we conducted on social applications in 2007.) But this single number hides a complex set of behaviors.

Only 18% of those online consumers had actually gone to the trouble of publishing a blog or Web page, uploading video or music, or posting articles or stories online. We call these people (like Lego enthusiast Eric Kingsley) Creators, and this group – less than one out of five – are creating the content that drives the whole social phenomenon. 

But what makes the social world online is that people can participate in so many ways. Not every has to be a Creator. In the classification we use with our clients, 25% are Critics, reacting to content from others by commenting on blogs or online forums (like Joe Comeau), posting ratings or reviews, or editing wikis. Collectors, who organize the social content in by compiling content feeds (RSS), “tagging” content, and voting on sites like digg.com, make up 12%. People on social networks like Facebook – Joiners – include 25% of the online population. And nearly half – 48% – are Spectators at least reading or consuming some form of social content (like Linda Dallas). These groups all overlap, of course. 

Before building a social application, you’d better look into what your customers are doing. For example, when Chevy wanted to market its Aveo vehicle to college students, it wisely leveraged their participation in Facebook and MySpace, since a majority of college students are Joiners. It started with people – its customer base – and built a program that matched what those people were doing.

What are your customers doing? You could survey them, or you could make reasonable estimates based on their demographics – we’ve got a social profile calculator up at groundswell.forrester.com if you’d like to try it. But building social applications for your customers without knowing their profile is like mounting an expedition in strange country without a map – you may not end up where you were planning.

by Josh Bernoff

We continually get asked by our corporate clients: why do people participate in social activity online? What drives them?

In Groundswell we tried to collect as many reasons as we could, to reflect the diversity that drives all this participation. In this post I'll list as many as I can. But this is just a start -- participation is as varied as the people who participate.

• Keeping up friendships. Facebook is about connecting with people you know, to find out what's going on with them.
• Making new friends. We’ve all heard stories of people hooking up on social networks. According to Forrester's consumer surveys, one in five online singles has viewed or participated in online dating in the past year.
• Succumbing to social pressure from existing friends. People in the groundswell want their friends there, too. Your friends, your daughter, or your golf buddies are emailing you right now, asking you to join them.
• Paying it forward. Having seen that a site is useful, you may be moved to contribute.
• The altruistic impulse. This is Flickr cofounder Caterina Fake's "culture of generosity." It's what made Wikipedia possible. People just want to help.
• The prurient impulse. People are sexy, entertaining, and stupid. All that is on display in an endless parade of exhibitionism.
• The creative impulse. If you're a photographer, a writer, or a videographer, the Web is the perfect place to show your work.
• The validation impulse. People who post information on Yahoo! Answers, for example, would like to be seen as knowledgeable experts.
• The affinity impulse. If your bowling league, your PTA, or your fellow Red Sox fans have connected online, you can join and connect with people who share your interests.

Respect this diversity. Keep it in mind as you set up your social applications. Assuming everyone wants the same thing as you do -- or as each other -- is a big mistake.

by Josh Bernoff

Groundswell is now in stock and shipping from Amazon.com and BN.com.

We'd be quite pleased if you buy a copy.

Please let us know what you think. Contribute a review to Amazon or BN's sites -- reviews make a big difference to buyers (as we discuss in Chapter 7).

See you in the groundswell.

by Josh Bernoff

Thanks to everyone we've been meeting with lately -- bloggers, press, and just interesting people -- for being so interested in Groundswell.

We're just beginning, but looking at only people who've actually read the book, a few early tidbits have appeared in Dan Greenfield's BernaiseSource and the Wall Street Journal's Business Technology  blog.

The delightful BL Ochman twittered "Reading Groundswell http://tinyurl.com/2tb2gj & think it will become a new media marketing classic. every page is great! do not miss it! " (Thanks BL!)

Social Media Today made us Bloggers of the Week and called us the Steve and Eydie of social media.

Scoble went on and on about all sorts of stuff but mentioned the book a bunch of times in his video on Rodney Rumford's site facereviews.com

And Beet.TV posted their interview with me from Digital Hollywood.

by Josh Bernoff

Join me for a talk about Groundswell and how to build and run a successful community, sponsored by Lithium. Sign up here. The Webinar is at 1:00 eastern, 10:00 pacific.

Many companies use Lithium communities for Supporting their customers, one of the five key objectives we cite for groundswell strategy.

Lithium is featured in our book including the incredible story of the support forum that saved Christmas when an earthquake in Asia cut many of the support phone lines for router-maker Linksys. We also quote Lithium CEO Lyle Fong on how recognition systems are crucial in making communities successful.

Should be an interesting online event.

by Charlene Li

In my work, I often find that companies eager to create a social strategy often struggle with how to get started. One of the key recommendations we have in the book is to find the spark, champion, and evangelist within the company -- the person who is most passionate about forming a relationship with your audience, be it customers or employees.

You probably already know who this person is within your organization. It may be the technie who brags that she's been blogging since 1999, or the corporate communications person who loves to talk with customers on external bulletin boards. This person is probably also a bit a thorn in the side of management, constantly agitating for under-represented customers who are suffering some sort of injustice at the hands of management that just "doesn't get it".

As Shel Israel and Robert Scoble put it so nicely in "Naked Conversations", these radicals constantly push against the corporate membrane, stretching it close to the breaking point.

Well, it's time to get these radicals turned into revolutionaries. Let me explain by telling the tale of two Thomas' -- Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson.

Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense in 1776, which advocated for American independence from Great Britain and stimulated colonial fervor toward independence. He was the spark that lit the American revolution. But Paine never really settled down and after the American Revolution was over, he headed off to France and its revolution, got thrown in jail and almost executed. Prominent Americans interceded and he was released to return to the US. Back home, he cast about for a role, but the revolution was over. He was a man without a cause, and when he died only six people attended his funeral. One obituary read, "He lived long, did some good, and much harm." Paine was a radical, agitating for freedom and challenging authority.

Thomas Jefferson, in contrast, was a revolutionary. A writer and scholar like Paine, Jefferson was chosen to write the Declaration of Independence. But it wasn't just his writing skills, but also his ability to forge compromise and consensus that won him the job. Through the hot summer of 1776, Jefferson worked with the Second Continental Congress to draft the Declaration. It took time and effort to put together the framework and the process to bring about the revolution. He forged relationships with the other members of Congress, and brought them to the table to sign the document. There was fear about the consequences, but the Founding Fathers leaned on each other for support. Jefferson went on to become the Governor of Virginia and third President of the US.

I tell these stories because companies are in the midst of a social revolution -- specifically, one being led by their customers and employees. The question becomes how do companies deal with it, but more importantly, how do they tap into the energy of potentially disruptive radicals and channel them into being revolutionaries who can lead positive, lasting change?

This was the gist of the speech I made at SXSW last week (slides are available). I believe that:

Making revolution stick will require frameworks and process

The POST method provides much of that framework and process. It's a blueprint, and starting point for the revolutionaries in your organization. They need to know that executives are bought into the process, and they need to know what the goal is. After that, I suggest that you let them do their thing -- stand back and watch them revolutionize and transform your organization.

by Charlene Li

Today I tried out Starbucks' new customer feedback and idea generation site at mystarbucksidea.com, which is powered by Salesforce Idea (it's the same product that's behind Salesforce's own Idea Exchange and Dell's Ideastorm).  Josh and I feature these two sites in our Groundswell book, as an example of how a company can execute an "embracing" objective.

On these sites, people like you and me can "share" an idea. Then other people can "vote" for them, and the ideas with the most votes float to the top.  People can "discuss" an idea by adding comments, and  finally, to close the loop, Starbucks will provide feedback and status reports on the most promising ideas.

The results: Starbucks "launched" the site on March 19th. The top idea as of today is for Starbucks to offer a "punch card" to provide a frequency discount or free drinks. It has 29,410 points, which means that 2,914 people have voted for it (each vote counts as 10 points). The site's "Ideas In Action" section has a post (sorry, no permalink!) has an entry on March 24th saying that this particular idea is being reviewed and will be incorporated into the Starbucks Card Reward program.

The reason why I was so intrigued with the Starbucks site is that I'm a loyal user of Starbucks, so I have plenty of ideas on how they can improve their service. Just how much do I use Starbucks? It's my default place to work on weekends (the empty office is too depressing and having spouse/kids at home is a recipe for non-work) and my remote office when I'm traveling. As a result, I know where the electrical outlets are at all of my local Starbucks and bring along an extension cord. I also have a list of Starbucks stores bookmarked on my phone browser.

What's impressive is that I'm feeling more connected with other Starbucks fans, especially those craving healthier breakfasts, automatic ordering with my Starbucks card (mine is a simple Grande decaf), and my pet peeve, more power outlets.

But Starbucks, please don't let this engagement end! I want to subscribe to your Ideas in Action "blog" via RSS so that I can find out more about what's new -- and to see if my favorite ideas are being implemented. I want to comment on your blog too, to let me know that I'm happy/not happy about your future decisions. Close the loop, and you've not only got me hooked, but I'll walk the extra block in NYC or drive the extra mile to go to you rather than another coffee house.

Update: It hit me that I'd like to know your experience with Starbucks Ideas. What do you like/don't like about it, and more importantly, what brands/companies would you like to see adopt something similar? I'm curious to see if you would participate and contribute more to personal, consumer brands like Starbucks, or if there's also an affinity to business-oriented companies like Salesforce.

by Josh Bernoff

In 2007, an amazing groundswell of support did what many thought was impossible -- persuaded CBS to retract its cancellation of the show Jericho and promise to air it again in 2008.

We wrote about this in our Sloan Management Review article, describing how CBS Entertainment head Nina Tassler, faced with 20 tons of nuts as physical evidence of the show's following, agreed to put the Jericho back on. [Note, the article wont' be free for much longer.Article no longer free, but an excerpt is available at the link above.]

Well, now the show has been canceled again. The audience was simply not large enough to keep airing it on CBS.

You might think this proves that bringing Jericho back was a mistake. Or even that the groundswell isn't as powerful as we've been saying. But I beg to differ.

First of all, all network shows are a crapshoot. Evidence of signs of life in the audience means it may be worth the risk. When CBS brought back Cagney & Lacey in the 80s, it had four more years of life. Based on the following it developed later, NBC made a mistake canceling the original Star Trek. Was it worth the risk to bring back Jericho? Yes. It was worth a shot.

Beyond that, networks nearly always own a stake in the shows they air. By bringing back Jericho, CBS has confirmed it has a passionate audience, but one that is not large enough to be profitable on CBS. But that audience likely is large enough to be successful on a cable network like NBC Universal's Sci-Fi. If Jericho continues on Sci-Fi or elsewhere, CBS will make some money on that. Probably more because the audience has proven itself to be loyal.

What's the lesson here for social strategists? It's not that the groundswell can be ignored. It's still a powerful force. Just don't assume a small, passionate group is representative.

When Dell created a Linux PC based on votes from its IdeaStorm idea community, did that mean that Dell thinks everyone wants a Linux PC? Of course not. But Dell was convinced that the audience for Linux was large enough to warrant a product, one which apparently is doing quite well.

Given the non-representative nature of social application participants, in particular content Creators (not only are they obviously younger on average, they also underrepresent the mass of passive lumpish consumers) it's dangerous to follow them. But it's also dangerous to ignore them -- they're your loudest and most engaged customers.

Once you've got this well understood, you can blend their ideas with your own judgment to make decisions. CBS' decision to cancel Jericho was undoubtedly the right one -- the audience was just not going to be there. But based on the show's enthusiasts, the show will succeed somewhere.

How are you treating your most enthusiastic customers? Are you out of touch with their needs? Are you being persuaded by them to do something the rest of your customers won't want? Or have you blended their judgment with your own? That's a skill worth developing.

by Josh Bernoff

As you can see, we've made a few changes here at the Groundswell blog. As the availability of our book inches ever closer (about two weeks away now) we've put the blog in the context of a broader site with a whole bunch of goodies for you.

Feel free to browse around, but I'd like to draw your attention to one key feature: a free data tool about consumers around the world and their behavior around social technologies.

You may recall that we group people in the social world into six overlapping groups: Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators, and Inactives. We show these groups as steps on a ladder based on their increasing levels of participation in social technologies. (We've conducted more surveys and refined our definitions since our original post on this topic almost a year ago.) Basically, you're in a group if you participate in one of the behaviors shown in this graphic on that rung, at least once a month.

Now comes the fun part. Forrester painstakingly collects data from countries on four continents: North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. And we can calculate the Social Technographics Profile -- basically, the level of social participation -- for any group