Groundswell – Winning in a world transformed by social technologies – is written by two senior analysts at Forrester Research. The goal of this book is to make new media less intimidating to businessmen. The businesses they are targeting in this book are large businesses. And while small businesses can take some of the information in this book and apply it, it really isn’t who the book is aimed at. The book is written with a very corporate feel, think lots of charts and numbers and while they do supplement this with stories, it’s still a fairly boring read.
The title Groundswell is defined as: A serial trend in which people use technologies to get what they need from each other, as opposed to traditional methods of going through corporations.
The first part of the book examines the different people using new social media. It gives a breakdown of who is creating the content, who is commenting and who is listening.
The second part of the book goes into how to use different social media to connect with your customers. Again, really aimed at large companies and they some nice examples. For instance, how TiVo uses a social networking forum to:
Support – by answering questions that their customer’s have and letting customer’s help each other.
Listen – by monitoring what their customers are saying about their company
Talk – by asking questions and engaging their customer’s.
p. 183 “by listening to your customers you can make better products faster. You will have ideas that no one at your company has ever thought of. Your most loyal consumers will help act as a think tank for ideas and improvements. This is a powerful thing to tap into.”
Another nice thing they describe in this chapter is how companies are sorting through all of this data to find the most pertinent responses. By using technology similar to what DIGG uses, consumers can vote up or down different ideas that their fellow consumers wrote. This way the topics that most consumers agree with or feel passionately about will surface to the top.
The third part of the book is about how connecting with the “groundswell” will change your company. And also their prediction as to how the groundswell is going to change into the future. The last part of the book was really boring to read and didn’t do much for me. How connecting to the groundswell would change your company was very obvious. Also their predictions for the future showed their lack of imagination.
Interesting Points
Tags – By looking at how people tagged your company on Delicious, you can see how people perceive your company. These are also a good place to start when looking for keywords for AdWords. Also, while only a small amount of people are tagging, 7% in the US, these people are defining how everyone else sees you.
This book as well as many others talk about how the source of information used to make purchasing decisions is changing. In the past people looked to institutions and advertising to make purchasing decisions. Now, more and more of these decisions are coming from recommendations, from friends and family, and more importantly from online peers that they most likely have never met. According to Forrester:
83% of people trust recommendations from friends
50% of people trust online reviews
And trust in traditional advertising is plummeting.
Posted by hobokin 
