by Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li

Our Webinar was a big party -- over 700 people joined us! Of course, that made it difficult to answer all of your questions, but they were so interesting we've answered them all right here. Every question here came from someone who attended the Webinar. We learned an awful lot from your questions.

In these answers, where we refer to a Forrester report, the executive summary is available to everyone, but the full report is available on to Forrester clients (or you can buy it).

In the comments, let us know if you'd like to see us do another one, and on what topic.

Strategy and the POST Method

How do YOU define social computing?

Applications in which people connect with and draw strength from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations. Similar to the way we define the groundswell.

Do you think people influence each other more through opinions or through behavior (herding)? How does this impact your online media strategy?

Both. Your media has to influence important individuals a lot, and masses of people as well.

Does your POST methodology enable/secure an organization's ability to develop a 'living' and sustainable strategy that identifies, understands and applies the appropriate technologies in an environment of rapidly emerging social media tools?

That's a tall order. The POST method positions you correctly to not be sway with the breezes of rapidly developing technology. The hard part is positioning your company and its thinking. Once you do that, judging new technology opportunities is easier.

In the POST framework, why are people put before objectives? Shouldn't objectives come first?

Either way works well (but OPST is harder to remember than POST). I'd argue that if your customers aren't ready for social technologies, then your objectives will be hard to accomplish with social applications, which is why we start with People. But starting with Objectives can work just as well. It's starting with Technology that will confuse you.

How do you identify what technologies are best when you're trying to launch a new product where there is no previous audience?

We wrote a report on How To Choose The Right Social Technologies. Which ones you choose depends on your objectives.

I missed the T in the Post acronym, please explain. Do you think that by encouraging on line communications you are missing out a large proportion of customers who are not computer literate?

T is for Technology -- choose only after you have decided on People, Objectives, and Strategy. The P will help you with the question you asked -- if your customers are mostly over 65, then don't spend all your money on MySpace, for example. The Social Technographics Profile tells you how much of your audience you can reach with social technologies of various types.

The main idea behind social media is the unintended use of the platform and the unanticipated benefits, locking our vision on a certain set of objectives might limit our openness towards those, I think building social media platforms and empowering community whatever their objectives are is the most important thing, what's your take?

This is an example of what I call Purist thinking. If you don't know your objectives, you may have a community that is vibrant and active but not accomplishing anything for your company. Better to know your objectives, even as you acknowledge that the groundswell itself is in charge of where it will go.

Communities, Social Networks, and Online Video

How do you find out if there is already a community to join related to my industry versus starting a new one?

Google your industry and the word “community” and you’re likely to find it if it's out there. Or search for an answer to a common question or term in your industry. Communities rank highly on search engines.

When starting a community there is only a few users at the beginning (I mean only a few users are posting to forums, blogging...). Isn't there a risk that the new users coming will think "there are only a few users so the products or services offered by the company must not be that good). How to manage this transition period between creating the community and having a large community of users?

Jeremiah Owyang did a whole report online community best practices. He blogged about it, too. Among his suggestions are to invite key influencers in your market to join, participate a lot yourself at the beginning, and use links to drive people to the community at first. Like this one, for our community. 

Where is the line drawn between when a company should create there own social network, or join an existing, successful one?

Jeremiah wrote a report called "Online Communities: Build or Join" that covers this question, and as usual, blogged it. (I swear, I'm not making this up, your questions just happen to match his reports.) His answer is that it depends on your objectives. If the existing network is vibrant and already has a lot of the features you're looking for, better to support or join it than to compete with it. If it's small, or doesn't address what you want, start your own. But you'll have to make sure you're talking about something your customers want to talk about -- a community about your product might not be that popular unless you're making Tivos or iPods.

Do you have any insight/best practice recommendations for how community sites are being tied into companies overall web strategy?

Jeremiah Owyang covered that too. If your community is central to your strategy, make sure to have a prominent link to it on your main Web page. If not, you might want to link it from one or more subsidiary pages. Our Groundswell community is important to Groundswell, but not as much to Forrester, which is why the link is in our menu above. You might also take a look at how Constant Contact does it.

As a marketing associate for an online publication company that provides marketing and sales resources and tools for the professional services industry, how would recommend that I utilize social networking sites, like LinkedIN? What tips would you give me to promote our brand and products?

Linked In's advertising model isn't completely mature yet, but it is a good way to make connections. You may want to create a page for your brand on Facebook and let your fans develop relationships with you.

How are you seeing what companies are doing to get viewers to look at their YouTube placements... and then where are they typically driving them from there?

First you need to have a great video. Then you contact some blogs that might be interested and see if they'll embed the video. It's also good to start them off on digg.com. But it has to be something really fun, like willitblend.com

Is there a typical lifecycle for a social media community or blog? How long should I plan to keep it running? Do they fade out naturally?

If they're successful, the last a long time and naturally spread to variant applications. You need to plan for this.

Specific Examples and Industries

Do you have examples of B2B sites, where companies are successful at seeking ideas/input from business/institutional decision makers?

IT Toolbox is one. Constant Contact is another. The MIKE2.0 Wiki is a third. There are other examples in Groundswell.

Re. the brides.com example: Do you think they're (users) excited about a brand, or just want a cool widget? Does it matter?

The whole point is that it doesn't matter. Brides.com is taking good feelings about weddings and linking it back to their property.

We have heard successful case studies of companies who have leverage social technologies to achieve their goals (e.g., P&G Being Girl). In your research do you have examples of worst cases where companies totally missed the mark by not following POST methodology.

We have plenty of examples of failures in Groundswell. Unsurprisingly most aren't willing to share their names. You can go wrong by targeting the wrong people, being unclear on objectives, ignoring strategic implications, or choosing the wrong technology or technology vendor. Or you can get all those right and go wrong somewhere else.

Is there a similar site [to beinggirl.com] for boys? I have a 12 yr step-son. He would benefit from that.

Don't know of one . . . maybe you should create it! (beingboy.com isn't in use, but somebody has registered it).

Are the Dell blogs and idea storm part of Dell.com, or are they separate sites? Do you recommend linking to blogs from your main site, or making them a separate site? How do consumers find the blogs if they are separate sites?

The Dell sites are on separate domains, but linked in many cases. It depends on how you want to mvoe traffic around, and how closely allied you want your blog to appear to your company. For example, the blog you are reading is a central part of the Groundswell microsite. Forrester.com has links to it (and we have links to forrester.com) but it's not central to Forrester's purpose so those links are not prominent on forrester.com.

Jericho was picked up already by UHD and they're now showing reruns. 

No cable network has picked up the show for new episodes yet, but one of them is likely to do so.

Has Del Monte put the new product into the marketplace? How's it working?

It's out there -- I bought one in a Pet Store recently. Don't know if it's doing just ok or great.

Other than the Dell Share example do we have any examples of any FS player that has implemented programmes e.g. blog resolution programme?

There's is plenty of online activity in financial services. Wells Fargo is very active and Chase did a program with Facebook, for example.

My company works in investments, an industry selling highly intangible products in an extensively (some might say overly) regulated environment. We want to engage our clients in a social context, but it would have to be vigorously moderated/filtered. In your opinion, can this be done? What's an example of success in such an environment.

 

Both Pharma (myalli.com) and financial services companies have participated. It's all a matter of getting legal and regulatory people on your team from the beginning, and setting up guard rails so you don't need them looking in to every single post.

Hello, Do you think the use of social media for product development works for all markets. For example, do you think people would freely talk about their financial needs and desires or should this medium be used only for industries where people have a close relationship with the product? Thank you.

Not all markets, but I certainly think it work in financial services. Schwab got lots of insights from a Communispace community about Gen Xers and their financial services. They used this to create new products like a free checking account.

Within the travel industry, there are more & more social media sites being introduced. Do you foresee differentiation becoming increasingly more difficult in terms of drawing customers to one site over another?

Sure, it's hard to differentiate when everybody's doing it. But there are so many different strategies possible, so we don't expect everyone to end up the same. ;

What sites that focus on delivering branded journalistic content (e.g. NY Times, WSJ, USA Today, TIME, PEOPLE, Sports Illustrated, etc) do you think are doing a great job of using social media tools to help their visitors participate in creating content for their sites?

Check out ESPN.com, where they let readers comment on every story. And USA Today is basically a news site mixed with a social network now.

ROI/Metrics

How do you establish dollar values in the value column in the roi construct

Same as in any other business project. What is your goal, and how much would it cost to accomplish that goal by other means? Alternatively, what is the value to your business in increased sales, profit, margin, or some other financial metric? This is where metrics like cost per lead and equivalent spending on PR would come in.

Does Forrester provide help with metrics and valuation for objectives and social technologies?

Yes. I'm working on a report on that very topic right now.

Hello Josh and Charlene, Please elaborate on the best social media measurement tools, from the most simple to the more complex.

This question itself is complex. I'll be able to tell you more in a month or two -- for now we are still working on a detailed explanation of such metrics. Many of them are listed in Brian Haven's engagement report.

How did you come to determine the $ amount of the value of each of the blog categories. I.E. - Word of mouth - what did you base the value of this on.

Equivalent value of the goal accomplished by other means, for example, paying a PR firm to persuade reporters to write news stories. The details are in our report called "The ROI of Blogging," which we also blogged about.

Can you give some more info on the blog you are describing? How many writers, posts/day, engagement activities?

It's based on the GM Fastlane blog. For details you'll need to see the case study.

Do you have any numbers on how many people come to sites like the site for Dog lovers on the tampons one?

The "I Love My Dog" community was a private community set up for research purposes with only about 300 people in it. Beinggirl.com gets more than 2 million visitors a month.

Organization and Agency Relationships

Is it necessary to re-organize inside the enterprise if the company has a top down (hierarchical) approach in order to create a successful online strategy?

Quite the contrary. These applications work better as small projects out of single department. When you have a bunch of them going you may want to think about reorganizing -- that's what Dell did. ;

What do you think of as the ideal social media agency structure? Is it a consulting model with a project-based scope? Is it an agency model that helps manage a brand over a longer course of time?

Short-term thinking has driven many agencies to look like the former, but an agency that manages brands over the long term is better positioned for the valuable assets that social applications create. My colleague Peter Kim wrote a report about how Agencies Must Build Digital Skills To Survive.

To what extent are these community sites and initiatives created and developed by advertising/marketing agencies, or are they primarily developed in-house?

We've seen both. If they're built by an agency, long-term they may still end up managed by the company. 

Social Technographics

The total percentage on that slide was over 100%. Can you please explain how the percentages were generated?

That's not a mistake. People can be in more than one group -- it's not a segmentation. You could both read some blogs (Spectator), comment on others (Critic), and read others (Spectator), for example. See our explanation of Social Technographics.

How can a company persuade customers to step up the level of social engagement? Is it possible to move customers up the ladder?

That can be very difficult. They will move up, but social pressure from friends is a more likely cause than company activity. Counting on this kind of movement decreases the chances your strategy will succeed.

Competitors and Detractors

In any social network sponsored by a brand, their competitors will take note and become involved - either overtly or covertly. How do you manage them?

Their participation is inevitable in any open community. If they're not being disruptive, you have to live with that. If they start promoting themselves or disparaging you, you can kick them out, although that's easier to do if you've set a policy about it ahead of time.

Does the book talk about corporate responsibility/ethics? what's to stop a company from having an employee(s) from creating negative posts, videos, etc about competitors?

We talk about this in the book, but it's mostly an extension of existing policies. Most companies have policies that criticizing competitors is not appropriate except in certain limited settings, e.g. salespeople talking about features, or designated spokespeople with PR approval. You should extend these policies to the online world. If you're not allowed to stand up a conference and say it, you shouldn't be able to blog it, either.

There are companies that charge $1,000 a month to scour the Internet for your company's name, and 'suppress' the infavorable info with lots of new favorable copy. What are your thoughts on this new industry of 'profile management'?

We quote Grant Robertson in our book on this topic, even as he was quoting the TV show NewsRadio: "You can't take something off the Internet. That's like taking pee out of swimming pool." Better to spend your money on improving your reputation than paying somebody to shoot the messengers.

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

In February we published research based on our expectation that interactive marketers should continue their investments in social applications with a recession potentially coming.

Today we published the results of new research that shows that many interactive marketers actually plan increases in the face of recession. (Forrester clients will be able to see the whole report, others will see a summary when clicking on the link.) We asked this question:

Assuming the economy is in a recession in the next six months, how would you change your investment in interactive marketing overall?

Of 333 interactive marketers surveyed, 26% plan to increase their interactive marketing investments, and 46% will maintain them at current levels. (13% plan a decrease and 15% aren't sure.)

Where is that money going? Here's a chart from the report.

Social networks will get the largest number of increases, over 40% of those using it, along with user-generated content, blogs, and that old standby, email marketing. Every single form of online marketing we surveyed had at least half the marketers increasing or maintaining their investment (online display ads fared the worst; based on this sample it could see more decreases than increases.)

Note that the variation in N reflects the varying number of people familiar with or using each type of marketing. But for all the major technologies we got more than 100 responses.

Are these typical of marketers in general? Remember, the respondents are interactive marketers at large and medium-sized companies and ad agencies, so you can expect a little more optimism. But I believe these results reflect a real commitment to the power of interactive marketing over traditional advertising, which always suffers in a recession.

This is also evidence that in contrast to the bubble of 2001/2002, this housing-driven downturn hasn't spread to depress all investment in new ideas. People are recognizing that in a recession, social application investments are relatively cheap and deliver measurable results, despite their newness.

Our advice to marketers, as describe in the report, is this: measure what you do, so you can justify it when the axe comes. And build assets, not campaigns, it's a better use of your money.

Marketers reading this -- do you agree with what our panel said?

by Josh Bernoff

As Twitter swells, at least in the minds of Groundswell thinkers, you have to wonder what people are saying about you.

It's easy enough to track that (in theory . . . more on that later) using tools like TweetScan and Summize. I had been using TweetScan for a while but @samlawrence kept telling me to try Summize, which has a few more features. Both are free, of course, and they work in the obvious way -- searching the entire public record of all Twitter posts and finding instances of words you request.

There are plenty of examples of companies that have connected with customers using these tools. Mashable describes how a vendor called Disqus solved a customer's problem after noticing a Tweet about it. Amy Worley monitors twittering about taxes for H&R Block. And Comcast is getting started with responding to customers in the space with @comcastcares.

But do these activities scale? What if your brand is huge? Conversation is nice and everything, but what you should you do about it? Here are some suggestions.

1. Start monitoring. It costs nothing but time. Go to Summize and type in your company's name. Or your product name. Or your name. This is hit or miss -- if you name is Fred Smith, or your company's name is Global Communications Corp, you're not going to learn much. But you'll learn more if your product is called something unusual like Kindle or GTA (those are links to Summize searches). This is especially valuable for new products, where feedback can be useful in changing features, positioning, or marketing messages. I've found it extremely interesting to watch people talking about Groundswell, for instance, which has a name sufficiently unusual that about 90% of the tweets that mention it are about the book.
2. Respond carefully. If your product is just getting started or has a tight niche audience, then it's valuable to respond to many of your customers, with an @yourtwitterhandle type reply. This can have a "voice from the sky" quality so open the conversation carefully, e.g. "Saw your tweet, hope you are enjoying our product, tweet back if you have questions." For customers having problems that you can solve, this may be a great way to turn a detractor into a fan (if you can solve the problem, of course). Why is it worth it to nurture these individuals? According to my colleague Peter Kim's report on the topic, Twitter users are more likely to be open to advertising and talk about products, magnifying the result of your efforts. When I see someone twittering positively about Groundswell, for example, I may tweet back and encourage them to write a review at Amazon.com or BN.com.
   
3. Get ideas. Above are three tweets I pulled from a Summize search on Home Depot. What a fascinating peek into people's relationship with this retailer! I can imagine a commercial based on each one (although the 4-year old with the nails is a little creepy). What ideas are your customer's contributing, for free, that could benefit your company or your marketing?
4. Don't get fooled. People who use Twitter are not typical. Based on last year's survey, this group skews young, male, affluent, and early adopters of technology -- and while Twitter has grown since then, it's certainly a mistake to think that Twitter members are typical in any way. So take their ideas, but don't imagine that they are representative.

There is an emotional component to Twitter. The people using it write in a very natural way about their lives, since they use it so frequently. Blogs, discussion forums, the wall on Facebook -- these are all slow-motion conversations. Twitter is a real-time conversation. I must admit to enjoying watching people tweeting about ordering Groundswell, getting Groundswell, reading Groundswell, and buying Groundswell for their friends and clients. Whatever your product is, you deserve that experience, too. So crank up Summize and start listening.

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

Today we release our fourth data chart.

Our surveys cover hundreds of brands including retailers, computers, cars, and financial services companies. This allows our analysis to go far beyond what you can learn from demographics, like the profiles from our profile tool. For example, we recently published an analysis of 13 car brands and their owners. Below is a subset of four interesting brands. (You can see the full analysis if you’re a Forrester client or you buy the report; otherwise the link above will show you only the abstract.)

In every market we examine, patterns emerge. Some brands have intensely engaged customers – those brands are missing the boat if they don’t get started with social applications rapidly. Others have slower moving customers – they can affort to wait. And even among those with high engagement, the type of social participation varies.

In this case, we see that Pontiac owners have very few Inactives and the most Joiners of the four brands. With 30% Joiners (social network participants), it’s imperative that Pontiac connect with its owners where they’re already connecting with others. In fact, Pontiac started a college scholarship “Game Changing Performance” campaign on Facebook.

Honda has the most Critics, at 29%, but Honda hasn’t yet created a blog for them to react to, even though Technorati shows over 300 blog posts linking to the Honda site. The top Honda blogs are on automotive.com and motortrend.com, plus one maintained by a fan.

Jeep has the most Creators, at 22%. Sure enough, YouTube shows almost 40,000 Jeep videos and there are hundreds of Jeep blogs. I hope that Jeep is monitoring this activity through a service like Cymfony; it’s an important source of feedback and insight.

Of the 13 brands that had enough customers to allow us to do a profile, Mercury had the most Inactives. In my opinion, brands with a profile like Mercury’s shouldn’t put aside much budget for social applications, aside from maybe some basic monitoring or a private community from a company like Communispace. What would you do if you were a brand manager at Mercury?

Plug: this post is sponsored by our Technographics team. They want to hear from you if you're interested in data like this about your brand.

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

For our third data chart, we wanted to show how some clients are using the Social Technographics Profile to make decisions about their social applications using our data. 

In this case, we’re looking at Alpha Moms, a group that includes mothers with above-average incomes and a favorable attitudes towards technology. Their profile is shown below.

The notable thing about the profile of Alpha Moms, as we describe in Chapter 3 of Groundswell, is that they’re more likely to be Critics than Creators – a fact that turned out to be important for the media company that was planning a community for them.

See the video below (or the book) for details on how the media company changed its strategy based on this information. (This is Charlene explaining this example from our consumer event last October.) If you're interested in more information about our data, we're happy to help.

Note for sticklers: the definition of Alpha Moms we used in Charlene's speech is slightly different from what we put in the book -- but the point is the same, that Critic, not Creator activities are the best fit for this group of consumers.

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.