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
Main Links
- Buy the book @ Amazon: Groundswell
- Official Site : Groundswell
- Table of content: Groundswell
- Download a free excerpt: Groundswell excerpt
- Official reviews :Groundswell testimonials
- Author blog : Charlene Li
- Author rss feed : Charlene Li
- Google links: Groundswell “Charlene Li”
- Google news : Groundswell “Charlene Li”
- Google Blogs search : Groundswell “Charlene Li”
- Technorati : Groundswell “Charlene Li”
- YouTube: Groundswell “Charlene Li”
- Quintura: Groundswell “Charlen Li”
Best Posts from Charlene Li’s blog
A selection made with AideRSS
Selection of product reviews on blogs :
What is the groundswell? A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations (or associations like ours.) Some of the association community is already being impacted by the groundswell…it’s only a matter of time before all of us will be impacted.
Li and Bernoff present a strong case for organisations to look on Web 2.0 as an opportunity rather than a threat. They do this by presenting what they refer to as their Social Technographics Ladders in which they classify customers depending on their Web 2.0 activities.
To hammer home their message, the authors pay particular attention to Kevin Rose, the founder of news aggregation site Digg.com.
One of the poster boys of a new generation of web services entrepreneurs, Rose was at the sharp end of the Web 2.0 revolution when a sensitive piece of “news” was removed from the Digg site by the site operators. When this happened, Digg users spread the offending article across other sites and blogs. As a result, the story re-appeared on Digg, and once again all traces of it were removed. When Digg got tired of repeating this process it relented, giving editorial control back to its users. “Caught between a lawsuit and its own audience, Digg bowed to the greater force: the audience,” write Li and Bernoff.
“Groundswell” is the social trend that happens when people start connecting with each other via social technologies. The result: they start getting what they need from each other, rather than from companies. That’s incredibly disruptive to businesses who adhere to traditional ways of managing and marketing.
Not only does the book provide a thorough overview of the current state of social technologies and their impact but it also discusses how businesses can adapt to them. Charlene emphasizes in the book and in my discussion with her that the focus should not be on the individual technologies that shape the social web (and the groundswell) but instead on the relationships.
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[...] Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester, Inc. explain how to turn this threat into an opportunity in Groundswell, in that companies can now reach a broad audience. Looking at it this way, you can see that the [...]