Groundswell - A TMC Must Read

Chris Willis signing in for week two of the new series of TMC Must Read reviews. This week, I will be discussing Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff from Forrester Research. This is a new book with some interesting ideas, so I hope you find it valuable to you.

Published this year, 2008, the book is designed to provide an actionable overview of how Social Computing contributes to enterprise marketing. So before we talk about the book, let’s do a short primer on social computing. Social computing is a loosely used term to categorize blogs (or “web logs,” which are online journals), wikis (socially managed encyclopedias of information), forums (the closest thing to the old-school bulletin boards of the Compuserve era), social networks (facebook.com, myspace.com, eons.com, etc.), Twitter (a micro-blogging service popular amongst mobile users), and so on. The point of social computing is to bring together like-minded (or not-so-much) people in an un-moderated or lightly-moderated community, and provide a conduit for open communication. 25% of US consumers read blogs to learn about products, services, and the like, and that number continues to grow.

The Groundswell was written as a follow-up to Forrester’s 2006 report on the topic of social computing, and is delivered to provide an overview of the space (as many of us need a primer), explain that people are out there talking about your products/services/etc and you can’t stop them (so its best to work with them and listen) and then provide a clear set of strategic recommendations on how to incorporate social computing into our marketing agendas, and this reader was impressed with the depth the writers achieved, and how, coming in fairly cold on the topic, I was provided with ideas and tactics that I could enact almost immediately.

The book is really segmented by three topics:

• Understanding the groundswell and the tools you’ll need.
• What you’ll need to do about it/with it.
• Information to help readers use the groundswell in their own companies.

Each chapter includes at least one, and often more real world case studies, so in that way, it is not unlike Chris Halliwell’s class. I find case studies to be the easiest way to understand a new concept, so this worked well for me, personally. The book starts with a very simple example of social computing and how things can get out of control very quickly. In the example, the writers describe the days in which Digg, a social bookmarking service, came on to the national stage. Digg is a site that allows you to share your favorite websites/pages with friends in your “network.” Long story short, the security encryption key for the new HD DVD leaked online, and many people “Dugg” the page, driving the illegal content to the front page of the Digg site. After complying with an order to take it down, and the inability to keep it off Digg due to the social nature of the network and the desire of the users to share that information, Digg’s founder, Kevin Rose, took a stance and let the community determine the content on the site.

This scenario highlights the simple fact that companies can work with the community, by listening, assisting, supporting and collaborating with critics and contributors, or conversely, companies can fight the populous, and in most cases hurt themselves and their public image. So, if customers and users and partners are using the social networks, wikis, blogs and so on to determine their opinions of your business, the writers believe it is best to be involved in the process. You need to identify the members of your community; the critics, the contributors, and the listeners and you need understand how best to work with them.

I could go on for a lot longer with this, but I’d just be rewriting the book. But in closing, in recent months, my company has started two different blogs, has a number of people using Twitter, and has opened a user forum. Since then, we have had over 5000 visitors to the sites, have been linked to by 100s of other sites, and have a search result page a mile long. We are a larger presence on the Internet in order to collect more incoming feedback both on our current products (our main blog) and our products to come (our R&D blog).

Yes social computing is new, and “new” is sometimes passed over as unnecessary. I don’t believe this to be the case, and Groundswell does a fine job of jumpstarting 2009 planning.

For links to other “Must reads” at the TMC Website, click here.