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

Does your company reject change?

Of course not. You love change, don’t you. Change is good. That’s how companies grow. The bigger the company, the more a little change will do it some good.

Baloney. You all know the truth. Companies are like organisms with immune systems. If you’re a change agent, you’re the antigen. Your company wants to reject you, and it’s got lots of systems to block that -- accounting systems, legal systems, management hierarchies, policies and procedures.

Social applications and their champions run afoul of this all the time. Why? Because the people in your social applications – your customers and prospects – are out of control. Who knows what they might say or do? And you want to make that a part of how your company runs? That’s what stimulates the allergic reaction.

But you can succeed. Here are our best tips, taken right from the pages of Groundswell, which could have been called, “How to be a social provocateur and still succeed within a company.”

• Start small. Don’t try to change your whole company overnight. Pick a single project, a single brand, a single group of customers, and work on that (or them). You’ll seem smaller and less threatening to the status quo. And you’ll get the chance to foul up and learn in a sheltered environment.
• Get an executive sponsor. When the you-know-what hits the fan, you’ll need somebody in a high place to cover your back. At Dell, it’s Michael Dell who gives people cover. At Unilever, it was two top executives: Babs Rangaiah and Rob Master. Who’s your sponsor? You’ll need her. Take her to lunch now and make sure you can count on her.
• Line up the stakeholders ahead of time. Will legal be blocking you? Then get a person from legal on your committee. Or a regulatory affairs guy. Or somebody from accounting, or brand management, or whomever might be threatened by what you’re doing. You want them on your side. And you want to hear their objections early, not when you’re about to launch and they can shut you down for some policy violation you didn’t even know about. In the months it takes to spec and build your application, you can win them over, or learn from them and change what you’re building as necessary.
• Set deadlines and move fast. This is how you get the objectors’ objections out of the way now. If your launch is six months off, they won’t pay attention until month five. If it’s one month off, you’ll get to their objections now. Speed also helps – you’ll be up and running before they can figure out some new reason to object. Lionel Menchaca and his team got the Direct2Dell blog up in three weeks. (This was a week later than Michael Dell wanted.)
• Seek precedents. What’s your competitor doing? Is your community, your wiki, your blog like one in another industry? Show them to your management and anyone else you need to convince. (Groundswell has 65  examples including 25 full case studies, indexed by industry, by strategy, and by geography – you might find what you’re looking for by starting with page 265.)
• Make friends. Join communities like the Social Media Club, or Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell's Society for Word of Mouth. Find people who are doing what you’re doing. Lean on them. Learn from them.
• Measure your success. The surest way to fail is to be unable to prove you accomplished anything. Decide what you’ll measure up front – buzz, conversion rates, sales, community memberships. Prove it accomplishes your objectives. And then prove your application is delivering results. (If it isn’t . . . fix it!)
• Don’t stop at one application – build! So six months have gone by. Your first application is successful. Go ahead revel in it – for ten minutes. Then build on it. You have momentum – you’ve bested all the obstacles and proved you can deliver results. The second app will be far, far easier. Doing one proves you’re a prodigy. Doing two or more will get you promoted.

What’s your best tip? Add it in the comments.

by Josh Bernoff

Thanks for all your responses on the scale I posted. Recall that 10 is an extreme purist (power to the people!) and 0 is an extreme corporatist (power to the corporation!). I saw people coming in all over the scale.

Here's what I learned:

1. Nobody likes to be pigeonholed. I loved this from frymaster.

When I'm drinking [which is most of the time], I'm a 10. When I'm at the client I'm a 5. Unless I had a little nip, and then I'm a 7.

 

I also enjoyed Mark's attempt to add a dimension. People just can't get comfortable living on a line segment.

2. A lot of people seemed comfortable in the 5 to 7 range (or couldn't tell my definitions of 5 and 7 apart). Here are the definitions again.

7 The groundswell is powerful, but companies have a role in it. Groups of people inside of enterprises can get together and make themselves heard. Even so, the groundswell will always prevail over their interests.

5 Companies belong in the groundswell. They have interests just as the people do. They will set up corporate efforts -- presences in places like Facebook or their own corporate blogs -- and connect with their customers. They can't shut down or co-opt people in the groundswell, but they can form meaningful relationships with them. And they can accomplish goals like marketing or collaborative innovation, if they respect that they're not in charge.

Given the fact that our active readers are probably the biggest believes in the power of social, this shows an amazing tolerance for corporations. Maybe because to make a living doing this stuff, you have to give the corporation a role. I'm quite happy myself at 5 and expect to sell a lot of books to others who are comfortable there.

3. I was intrigued by the perception that people were moving. I especially liked this comment:

The last number [average of businesspeople you meet] is the one I see movement in every day...one at a time I'm seeing people who used to be 2 or 3 become a 4 or 5.

So here's the interesting question. Is the business world slowly creeping towards the middle, or headed towards the purist end? Are we going to end up with a balance between enlightened corporations and powerful people, or are the people just going to overrun the corporations and take over? I think how you answer this says a lot about everything you do while working in the groundswell.

by Josh Bernoff

It's time for me to weigh in on the question: can companies be part of the social world?

This is in part a reaction to Shel Israel's comments of a few months back and my colleague Jeremiah's Owyang's responses. But it's an ongoing issue that comes up often in the blogosphere in my conversations with corporate clients.

On the one side are the folks who say, "The social world is an emergent phenomenon generated by people connecting." The original Cluetrain Manifesto rails against many aspects of the corporate world and basically posits that the right way for companies to get involved is for people inside those companies to connect to their customers. Based on my recent participation at a Cluetrain event, Cluetrain author Doc Searls still harbors a lot of skepticism toward corporations pursuing goals in the social world. For shorthand, let's call these folks the Purists.

On the other side are companies who are looking at the social Internet and saying "how can we exploit this to do what we already do -- PR and advertising, for example?" PR and advertising are mostly one-way, broadcast type communications, and these folks continue to try to adapt those one-way modes of thinking in the two-way, read-write world of social computing. I'll caricature these folks as the Corporatists.

I'm here to stand up and proudly say, Purists and Corporatists, you're both wrong.

Here's how I suggest people in companies think about social computing.

If you're in a company, your company can participate. In fact, you must participate. Your customers and prospects are connecting and talking about your products and your company right now -- this is what we call the groundswell. You need to be a part of the conversation. You might start a blog, you might start a Facebook group, you might start a community, or begin twittering, but until you start connecting as a corporate employee, you won't understand what's going on out there. And it can and will bite you.

You also need to start with the recognition that you are not now, nor will you ever be, in control of this "channel," "world," "phenomenon," or whatever you want to call it. It goes its own way and it will continually surprise you. This is where the Purists are right and the Corporatists are fooling themselves. But this is not so new. When my colleague Charlene Li was writing about how to deal with Wikipedia, I suggested it's no different in some ways from the New York Times -- you can influence it, but you're not in charge of it. Same with the rest of the social world -- you can participate, but not control. If this scares you, great. If you can't deal with it, somebody else in your company had better head up your social technology efforts.

But the fundamental principle behind about 80% of our book Groundswell is that you can accomplish corporate objectives in the social world. This is what bugs the Purists. As a corporate staffer, you have no business in the groundswell unless you know what you are trying to do there. You could be trying to increase awareness, generate word of mouth, surface leads, save on support costs, on tap into innovation. But regardless, no corporate activity should go forward without a measurable goal, and this is no different.

So, do you participate as an individual or a corporation? Of course, as a corporation. Companies may be made of people, but those people are not free agents. Your boss needs to know what you're doing, and, we argue in the book, your top management should, too, since they're going to inevitably get some surprises from these efforts. You'll need budget (maybe not a lot), and you need cover. Sometimes you need to push the membrane that Rob Scoble and Shel Israel talk about, finding ways to stretch corporate attitudes just enough to succeed. But you'd better be aligned with the corporation's goals, if not necessarily its tactics and every single one of its rules.

There's a lot of talk about authenticity, too. But the tone I hear from some Purists seems to be that if it's corporate, it has to involve lying, or at least deception. Please. Corporations, like people, have interests. They can talk about their products and services honestly. Of course they will be pro-company -- that's authentic, to believe in what you're making. But a pro-company attitude doesn't prevent two-way communication. In fact, in idea-generating applications like salesforce.com's IdeaExchange, or Credit Mutuel's sijetaisbanquier.com, it's that give and take between customers and people inside the company that fuels the innovation.

Teams -- small teams -- get most social projects done. Corporate bloggers may need help with moderation. Specifying, managing, and moderating communities is not a one-person job. These applications work best when they support corporate goals anyway. That's what gets you backers within the company, not just fearful detractors.

So it is no sin to conceive, create, and deploy a corporate social application. If you have a clear objective and can measure it, you are even likely to succeed. Just recognize that you must start from authenticity, it's a dialogue, and that the social world cannot be controlled. The companies I work with are starting to do this. It's not impossible -- in fact, it's the beginning of an incredible transformation. And their participation won't kill the groundswell, it will make it richer.

by Josh Bernoff

What does the groundswell of social technology mean for management? That's the question we had to ask ourselves when MIT Sloan Management Review invited us to write up the research in Groundswell.

I'm delighted to report that  you can now read the results. MIT Sloan Management Review has published our article, "Harnessing the Power of Social Applications." And while most of the articles in MIT SMR are behind a paywall, they are making this one available for free. [Note: as of April 1 the article is no longer available for free -- the link will send you to an excerpt.] Thank you, MIT SMR!

A quick aside. MIT and Harvard have a vigorous intellectual rivalry here in Boston (culturally, it resembles Red Sox/Yankees) -- many of the local professionals are alumni of one or the other. I went to MIT as a Ph.D. student way back when; Charlene, of course, earned her MBA from Harvard Business School. So having our book published by Harvard Business Press, and then getting an article into MIT Sloan Management Review, is a pretty sweet twofer.

While the article is was free, MIT SMR hasn't give us the right to copy it, so I can tell you about the article but not include excerpts. That said, here are some of the ideas we explored in the article, which jumps off from where Groundswell ended.

The article includes mini-case studies include CBS/Jericho, salesforce.com's IdeaExchange, the Chevy Aveo Livin' Large Campus Challenge, Fiskars' fiskateers.com community, Dell's community forum, and Best Buy's Blue Shirt Nation social network for its employees. (Some of these are also in the book, some are unique to the article.) But we stick to our central framework -- you choose your application based on your objectives -- an idea we debuted on this blog half a year ago and which remains at the heart of our analysis.

The article also includes data on use of social technologies across countries, and which applications are best for which departments within companies. Plus little tidbits of advice for the kind of managers who read MIT SMR (e.g. Line up executive backing, smart small and then expand). But our main point is that the cultural transformation that comes from embracing social applications is the best way to once again get the customer at the heart of decisions in the corporation.

I've seen a lot of advice for companies in the blogosphere, much of it really useful if mostly tactical. We tried to look bigger, at what really happens as medium and large size companies make social apps part of the way they do business. I'd love to hear whether you think we're on target. Go read the article and let us know.