Product Description

Corporate executives are struggling with a new trend: people using online social technologies (blogs, social networking sites, YouTube, podcasts) to discuss products and companies, write their own news, and find their own deals. This groundswell is global, it s unstoppable, it affects every industry and it s utterly foreign to the powerful companies running things now.

When consumers you ve never met are rating your company s products in public forums with which you have no experience or influence, your company is vulnerable. In Groundswell, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester, Inc. explain how to turn this threat into an opportunity.

Using tools and data straight from Forrester, you ll learn how to:



-Evaluate new social technologies as they emerge

-Determine how different groups of consumers are participating in social technology arenas

-Apply a four-step process for formulating your future strategy

-Build social technologies into your business including monitoring your brand value, talking with the groundswell through marketing and PR campaigns, and energizing your best customers to recruit their peers

Timely and insightful, this book is required reading for executives seeking to protect and strengthen their company s public image.

"Groundswell is jammed with big ideas, useful stories, and quotable stats. This is the new industrial revolution. Are you on board?"

-Seth Godin, author, Meatball Sundae

"This book will rock your world, if social technology hasn't rocked it already. It's a tsunami of unstoppable force. Amazon, Procter & Gamble, Facebook, Google, and Dell are profiting from the crest of the wave. Are you? Li and Bernoff are the apostles of the tsunami. This book will be your bible."

-Scott Cook, Founder and Chairman of the Executive Committee, Intuit

Groundswell provides practical advice on how to stay nimble and flexible in an ever-morphing digital world. Enabling your company to respond to change quickly especially when talking to and supporting your consumers is essential for business success.

-Cathie Black, President, Hearst Magazines

"The first phase of the Internet was about getting everyone connected. In this next phase, which changes the way we work, live, play, and learn, we re starting to realize the value of those connections as well as the new communications and experiences those interactions lead to the human network. Groundswell effectively documents this shift and underscores the opportunities available to all from this major market transition."

-John T. Chambers, Chairman and CEO, Cisco

"Heed the Groundswell! It's critical reading and helped us master the new dynamics of social media."

-Christina Norman, President, MTV

"Groundswell is a comprehensive look at the tidal wave of change engulfing marketers. Nobody should attempt to engage the newly empowered and emboldened consumer without first hearing what Li and Bernoff have to say on the subject."

-Clark Kokich, CEO, Avenue A | Razorfish

"Social technologies and the groundswell impact every business and organization worldwide. Li and Bernoff have written an insightful book that takes a refreshing research-driven approach to helping businesses transform themselves and successfully navigate this new dynamic landscape."

-Steve Rubel, Senior Vice President, Edelman Digital, and columnist for Advertising Age

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #166 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-21
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

Review
...you can't control users looking to utilize Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis and social networks... CIOs and other business leaders must embrace these technologies in the enterprise, and enable their employees to share and work collectively with each other to foster new innovations. --CIO Magazine, April 16, 2008

About the Author
Charlene Li is a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research. She is one of the driving forces behind Forrester s Social Computing and Web 2.0 research. Josh Bernoff is a vice president at Forrester Research and one of their most senior and most frequently quoted research analysts. He created the Technographics segmentation, a classification of consumers according to how they approach technology.

Customer Reviews

Jujitsu Manual for Managers--Brilliant!
What Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff have done is important. It's a well-written framework for understanding, tapping and ultimately transforming yourself and your organization through the groundswell. At times funny, at times heart-wrenching (in a business book?), Groundswell also provides thoughtful analysis of audience behaviors and ROI.

For anyone new to social media, part one on understanding the groundswell is the best primer I've come across. You get the three critical pieces of the puzzle in three easy chapters...

1. An explanation of why the groundswell is happening right now, thanks to the intersection of people, technology and economics.

2. An honest description of the most prevalent, mainstream groundswell technologies, including how they threaten institutional power.

3. An explanation of Forrester's social technographics, a demographic analysis capable of segmenting your audience according to a ladder of participation in social technologies.

From this foundation, Li and Bernoff outline different strategies for tapping into the groundswell--listening, talking, energizing, supporting and embracing--using case studies and stories from groundswell participants. If you're into social media, many of these case studies will be familiar. Still, the framework that Li and Bernoff provide is useful in gleaning a deeper understanding of the forces at work.

The Achilles heal? Like pretty much every other book on this subject, Groundswell focuses exclusively on corporate participation in social media. In the association world, our motivations and ultimate strategy will have some pronounced differences. But again, this book provides the framework to start (or re-start) a dialogue around social media for any association.

Provides a Clear, Strategic Framework for Your Social Media Initiatives
If you are an agent of change in your organization and need help from a credible source on how to best participate in the groundswell, this is your book.

The authors Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li present a strategic framework for you to develop your business case for change, It starts with understanding the social media participation patterns of your customers and prospective customers and considering the business issue(s) you are trying to address - listening, talking, energizing, supporting and/or embracing. You can get more of a flavor of this at the Groundswell blog.

The authors present ways to assess the return on investment based on the strategy you develop--something critical in your case for change. The book is filled with examples, both successes and non-successes, for business-to-business and business-to-consumer companies. Some, like Dell, have made amazing turnarounds by listening to the voices in the groundswell and changing how they do business from support to product development.

My test of a good book is one where pages are dog-eared so that you can go back and take action after reading (six for this one.)

Like one of the other comments I read, for the price of the book, you'd be hard-pressed to get such a clear strategic framework in your quest for organizational change.

Groundswell Is a MUST Read
Groundswell is well researched (Forrester research data from around the world, 65 corporate examples and 25 full case studies), written by two great, knowledgeable writers and fellow particpants, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, and is exceptionally readable at the same time.

Readability in a business book is of course a relative measure, but for me it relevance and time=value.

"Has value" means it is relevant to my work in real time (applicable right now, today; not 15 minutes ago) and therefore is a good (another relative measure and highly contextual) use of my time because yes, I have time deficit disorder that seems to never disappear regardless of which Circa or Hipster PDA strategy I deploy.

This translates into usefulness: I can use the information to support a recommendation to a client, add to a presentation, and/or as a catalyst for an idea or concept. Maybe even to write a blog post.

At the moment, I am writing a proposal for a client and using the social technographics ladder to support a recommended target for a program and to demonstrate how users will become involved and participate. Charlene and Josh have made this tool available on line.

I am also using their POST method as a framework for the strategy I am recommending. I find that for whatever reason, marketers seem to think that social media doesn't need a strategy or a well defined target and is driven by technology. POST which stands for People, Objectives, Strategy, and Technology...in that order, please, really puts this perspective.

I have a client company whose marketing folks have been setting up Facebook pages. So, of course there is no cost other than their time for doing this. It seems to make them feel like social media participants. We are on Facebook, they say. They friend each other and their agencies and consultants. Add several wall posts and away they go. But where are they going?

And then of course there is ROI. Yes, Virginia, there is an ROI for social media. Remember the objectives and strategy? A recruiting blog? How many applications did you get? A private community? What was the value for that new product idea? Start there. Add out of pocket costs (platform, creative, moderation etc).

Speaking of ROI, buy the Groundswell. Buy a copy for your clients. Buy a copy for your prospects. It will provide many returns.