I've enjoyed watched so many of you linking to and twittering about our little Groundswell microsite, because it means people are finding the site useful. Now that Groundswell's been out more than a year and has become a business including 18 analysts, we've got new goals for the Web site. The blog you are reading will continue, but we've added some new features to the site for you.

• There's a Consulting page which has details on how to work with us (speeches, workshops, projects, and data, for example). This also includes the long overdue Team page, so you can see all the analysts who work on Groundswell and our individual specialties. Go team!
• The Book tab still includes our graphics, videos, audio snippets, and other goodies, including the author bios (which used to be their own tab).
• The Calendar tab will include Groundswell speeches by the whole team, not just me.
• The Profile Tool tab includes something new -- a link to our widget with B2B users' Social Technographics Profiles. That new tool is embeddable --  you can put it on your own site. (That functionality is coming to the Consumer profile widget soon, too.)
• The Discussion Forum is just the same except for one thing  . . . we have a moderator, Zach Hofer-Shall, who is a researcher on our team. Zach's doing two things for us. First, he's clearing out the spam, so if you visited the forum and found it full of spam, we've fixed that. (And spammers, don't bother trying, Zach is vigilant against slime like you.) And second, he'll alert me and other analysts if there are posts there that ought to get a response from us.
• Finally, the big news -- the Forrester Groundswell Awards are starting up again for 2009. See the next post for details.

by Josh Bernoff

(My remarks on receiving the Visionary of the Year Award from SNCR, the Society for New Communications Research. As you can see, I bought "Charlene" with me, although she was feeling a bit "flat" last night.)

Let me start by saying I'm very sad that Charlene Li can't be here for real, since everything we did on Groundswell, we did together.

We were flabbergasted to get this honor and here's why: when we set out to write Groundswell, we explicity gave up on the idea of being visionary. Looking at the visionaries that came before us, notably the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto and Shel Israel and Robert Scoble, who wrote Naked Conversations, we decided early on that it would be tough to stake out a startling new area. Instead we decided to focus on how to make this concept of social technologies practical and useful. That's where the vision was needed.

So the first thing to learn about being a visionary is, don't start out trying to be a visionary.

The second thing I can share with you is that ignorance is vitally important. That's right, ignorance. I started out in 2007 with a very limited knowledge of the social world, and I think that naivete led me to see some things nobody else could see. Charlene was hardly naive about social technologies, but her own ideas needed to evolve to get us to the point where we could write a good book about it. The greatest advances in any field often come from people who are looking at it for the first time from a new perspective.

Third is testing your ideas. Everything in Groundswell was batted back and forth between the two of before it ever saw the light of day, and many of the ideas were tested as well on our blog and with clients. The weak ones were weeded out. The strong ones became stronger. That was essential to going further with these ideas.

Fourth is research. Everything in Groundswell is based on data we collected at Forrester, real world stories, and interactions with clients. Without that you're just makin' stuff up. It rings true because it is true.

Finally, vision doesn't mean a thing unless you can apply it. We've been all over the world talking about Groundswell, and people are using it. When I went to Wal-Mart and delivered it to their top management, they were creative in their reception of these ideas. That was encouraging. But the next day, they hosted some bloggers, and the bloggers have told me that they were still buzzing about the ideas and receptive to the new way of thinking. That means we changed minds in a place that matters. If you call that vision, I'll accept your judgment.

Thank you.

Photo by Shashi Bellamkonda. Charlene Li standup from photo by Thomas Hawk.

by Josh Bernoff

For my fans (yes, both of you):

My answers to Proust's Questionnaire, Hubspot version. (That's Marcel at left; he was the first one to answer the questionnaire, not the guy who created it.) This is my favorite part.

Person That Inspires You?

My father - who showed how to balance pride in your work with honesty and love. Bill Bluestein, the quintessential technology analyst, to whom Groundswell is dedicated. Isaac Asimov, who never stopped writing about everything. Regrettably, of these three, only my father survives.

Groundswell was chosen as one of Amazon's top 10 business books of the year. When you consider all the other great business books that came out this year, this is a nice honor. Hopefully we can get onto a lot of other year-end lists.

A couple of podcasts from Lois Paul & Partners' Beyond The Hype Blog. Here's an excerpt in which I speak about the political candidates' use of social technologies and my favorite things to blend.

My post about Barack Obama tapping the groundswell appeared in the Boston Globe.

Along these lines, if you're coming to the SNCR Awards ceremony, I promise to make things interesting.

by Josh Bernoff

Since we changed the URL for Groundswell, the traffic has remained about the same. But since we changed the feed ID, subscribers are down.

I'll make you a deal. I promise this week you'll see at least two really interesting posts, one on Monday, and one as soon as the company I worked with verifies the facts. All I want from you is to put the feed in your RSS reader.

Just click on the icon in our blog or right here. Thanks.