Must Read Summaries - Groundswell - Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff

The groundswell is a social trend first and foremost. Consumers are using online technology like MySpace, blogs, YouTube and more to interact with, share opinions and help each other rather than being limited to the products and services which are offered by corporations.

The groundswell is literally like a flood of consumer created information. From thousands of sources, your customers are today actively talking about your brand in ways which you certainly havent approved, vetted or initiated. The groundswell can wash over traditional business communications and completely drown out what you would prefer to be said.

Whether you like it or not, the groundswell is here to stay. Its likely even more technology-enabled tools will emerge in the future which will let consumers interact more easily with each other. With this in mind, you should make a concerted effort to first understand the groundswell and then find ways to thrive in it.

The overriding principle which should embrace everything you do in relation to the groundswellis to remember you need to concentrate on building and enhancing the customer relationship, not worrying about the technology involved. It doesnt matter whether the customer chooses to use the latest and greatest online technologies or wants to communicate with you using Morse code. The customer relationship is everything. Make each and every contact with your company positive and the groundswell will work for you rather than against you.

The groundswell is a spontaneous movement of people using online tools to connect, take charge of their own experience, and get what they need information, support, ideas, products and bargaining power from each other. The groundswell, is broad, ever shifting, and ever growing. Its global. Its unstoppable. And its utterly foreign to the powerful companies and institutions and their leaderships that run things now. If youre in a company, this is a challenge.

Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff

CHARLENE LI is an analyst on emerging technologies and the founder of the Altimeter Group. She was until recently vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, a technology research company. Ms. Li is a popular public speaker and is a frequently-quoted social technology industry analyst. She previously led the marketing and media research team at Forrester and has been publisher of interactive media for Community Newspaper group. She is a graduate of Harvard Business School and Harvard College. Her blog can be found at: charleneli.com.

JOSH BERNOFF is a vice president at Forrester Research. He is regarded as one of Americas most prominent and widely quoted technology analysts. Mr. Bernoff has consulted on strategy with senior executives from global companies including ABC, Best Buy, Cisco Systems, Comcast, LOral, Microsoft, Sony, TiVo, and Viacom. He has a bachelors degree from Pennsylvania State University and was a National Science Foundation fellow in the graduate program in mathematics at MIT. His blog can be found at: blogs.forrester.com/groundswell.>

The future of the groundswell

Now the genie is out of the bottle, business-as-usual just wont cut it anymore. The groundswell is irreversible, but thats okay. Connecting with the groundswell can actually transform your company for the better. It will force you to become customer-centric. And even better, groundswell technologies will enable great ideas to bubble to the surface from the bottom-up inside your corporation. To have a bright future, integrate groundswell thinking into what you do.

Aligning your company with the groundswell can be a completely transformational experience. It can and should make your company stronger and better. Big companies like Dell and Unilever have completely transformed themselves from being traditional marketing-led organizations into companies that are completely led by the groundswell. Many more companies will follow their lead. After all, the idea of keeping the customer at the center of your organization has always sounded very logical. The groundswell enables this to happen.

There are three elements which need to be kept in mind if youre planning on making the transition to being more groundswell aligned:

1. Take it one step at a time allow the necessary mental shift enough time to gel. Build a repertoire of small successes and let your people adjust their thinking before demanding radical changes to the way you do business.
2. Have a natural progression from one strategy to the next. Perhaps start with support strategies which lead to more thinking which then lead to embracing. Dont try and implement all the strategies at once that will only lead to confusion and a desire for the status quo. Have a logical plan and vision.
3. Make very certain you have solid executive support for whats happening someone in the senior management team has to be sold on groundswell thinking if you want your ideas and initiatives to survive. You may be able to do some low-level stuff on your own but to facilitate wholesale changes, get the managements approval first.

Keeping in mind these three elements, there are several other ideas which have worked at other companies which have succeeded in hitching their corporate wagons to the rising groundswell star. These are the best practices which have emerged thus far:

1. First and foremost, start small you only have so much political capital within your organization so pick your battles. Do something which validates what you are suggesting as the way to go in the future.
   
2. Educate your executives get them to use the groundswell technologies for themselves. Perhaps you can launch internal blogs, social networks and collaborative devices like wikis to demonstrate the benefits before going to your customers. Executives will assume most of this groundswell stuff is for kids so bring them up to speed.
   
3. Get the right people to run your groundswell initiatives meaning people with passion rather than those who have a space on their daily schedule. Get people who are passionate about the benefits of building the customer relationship. You can often tell who the right people are because they will already be using the word customer in most of their conversations.
   
4. Get your technology partners and outside agencies in sync so they can build on what youre trying to do. If these people dont understand the groundswell and are not willing to invest time and resources into getting up to speed themselves, then perhaps its time to look for new partners and agencies. You will need help to make it happen.
   
5. Keep planning not only the next logical step you need to take but also where you need to be heading long-term. Integrating the groundswell into your business model is always going to take time. Your vision will keep things moving forward through the inevitable rough patches. Try to describe what you want the customer relationship to feel like in the future. Realize you wont yet necessarily know what technologies youll need to use to achieve that but have in mind a vision of the kind of conversations youd like to be having with your customers. Youll be able to pull yourself up through the groundswell if your vision is clear and alluring.

Not only can the groundswell alter how you interact with your customers but it can also change the way you manage and support your own employees as well.