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Groundswell - SF Part 1 Chapter 1 - Why the Groundswell - And why now? ●

Digg.com and the forbidden key code

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When something appear on the internet it is impossible to take away

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The crowded mass of people on the internet is stronger than one single company

The phenomenon of the spreading of information that cannot be stopped online is called the Groundswell. While you can’t stop it you can understand it. The point with this book is to not only live with it but to thrive in it. The Groundswell comes from the collision of three forces: ●

People - People have always depended on each other and drawn strength from each other. People have always rebelled against institutional power, in social movements like labor unions and political revolutions. The rough balance between the scale economics of institutions and the rebellion of their constituents has shifted because of the advent and spread of social technologies.

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Technology - Has changed everything as far as people’s social interactions are concerned, everyone is online today. People’s connections are fast and ubiquitous and have led to a fundamentally different kind of software. With people connecting all the time, applications like facebook or twitter can connect people directly with each other. It’s the technology in the hands of almost-always-connected people that makes it so powerful.

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Economics - Along with the people’s desire to connect and new technologies, the third force driving the groundswell is simple online economics: on the internet, traffic equals money. Advertisers know that traffic indicates that consumers spend their time and attention online and act to translate that attention into advertising power.

These three trends have created a new era. This is the fastest growing phenomenon we call groundswell. Not only is it here; it’s evolving rapidly, creating an incredible challenge for corporate strategists. This changes the balance of power. Offline, people don’t change behaviors quickly, so companies can develop loyal customers. Online, people can switch behaviors as soon as they see something better. It’s the force of these millions of people, combined with the rapid evolution of new technologies by trial and error, that makes the groundswell so protean in form and so tough for traditional businesses to deal with.

Chapter 2 - Jujitsu and the technologies of the groundwell ●

Businesses and other institutions are built on control and the groundswell weakens and undermines control

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The principle for mastering Groundwell - Concentrate on the relationship, not the technologies

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In the groundwell, relationships are everything. The way people connect with each other, the community that is created determines how the power shifts

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If you want to organize your own collection of Web sites, for yourself or for sharing, tagging is the perfect tool

When evaluating new technologies: -

Does it enable people to connect with each other in a new way?

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Is it effortless to sign up for?

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Does it shift power from institutions to people?

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Does the community generate enough content to sustain itself?

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Is it an open platform that invites partnerships?

Chapter 3 - The social technologies profile ●

Three different types of interactions: - Creating - Reacting - Reading The ladder shows how we can classify consumers according to their involvement in the groundswell, placing them into one or more of seven groups. Each step on the ladder represents a group of consumers more involved in the groundswell than the previous steps. To join the group on a step, a consumer need only participate in one of the listed activities a least monthly.

Why do people participate in Groundwell? S.60-62 ●

Keeping up friendships

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Making new friends

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Succumbing to social pressure from existing friends

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Paying it forward

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The altruistic impulse

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The prurient impulse

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The creative impulse

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The validation impulse

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The affinity impulse

Part 2 - Tapping the Groundswell Chapter 4 - Strategies for tapping the groundswell Groundswell approach-avoidance syndrome - Look for these symptoms in yourself or your coworkers: ●

Strong, and in some cases obsessive, interests in the blogosphere and in online doings at sites like Facebook and Youtube. Repeated forwarding of articles on said topics to fellow sufferers

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Excessive salivation upon hearing much-repeated stories of corporations that have developed partnerships with social networking sites, started online communities, or otherwise managed to get help up as winners in new reports and at marketing conferences

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Checking the megablogs techcruch and gigaom multiple times per day to make sure you are as up to date as possible on all social media and Web 2.0 developments, rumors, stray thoughts and buzz. After a few hours of doing this, you feel as if you have run a half marathon while never getting anywhere at all.

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Increasing nervousness about answering superiors and subordinates questions about the company’s online strategy in the Web 2.0 era.

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Asking your teenage kids, What’s up with this Twitter thing? and listening intently for ideas you can use at work

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Anxiety at the thought of actually participating in social technologies, balanced by similar anxiety at the thought of missing out

Four-step planning process - POST POST is the foundation of groundwell thinking, a systematic framework for assembling your plan: ● ● ●

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People - What are your customers ready for? Objectives - What are your goals? Strategy - How do you want relationships with your customers change? Do you want customers to help carry messages to others in your market? Do you want them to become more engaged with your company? Technology - What applications should you build?

Five objectives that companies can pursue in the groundswell ●

Listening - Use the groundwell for research and to better understand your customers. This goal is best suited for companies that are seeking customer insights for use in marketing and development

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Talking - Use the groundwell to spread messages about your company. Choose this goal if you’re ready to extend your current digital marketing initiatives (banner ads, search ads, email) to a more interactive channel

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Energizing - Find your most enthusiastic customers and use the groundswell to supercharge the power of their WoM. This works best for companies that know that they have a brand enthusiasts to energize

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Supporting - Set up groundswell tools to help your customers support each other. This is effective for companies with significant support costs and customers who have a natural affinity for each other

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Embracing - Integrate your customers into the way your business works, including using their help to design your products. This is the most challenging of the five goals, and it’s best suited to companies that have succeeded with one of the other four goals already

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In B2B settings, picking an objective first is still the best practice

Suggestions for strategies in POST: ●

Create a plan that starts small but has room to grow

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Think through the consequences of your strategy

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Put somebody important in charge of it

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Use great care in selecting your technology and agency partner

What could go wrong? Creating and implementing a social strategy is hard, primarily because there are few precedents and role models to follow. This means you need to be constantly aware of the challenges and prepared to fix them. While there are many sources of failure, the most common relate to the four elements of the POST process. Chapter 5 - Listening to the groundswell “Your brand is what your customers say it is” - Robin ●

The value of a brand belongs to the market and not to the company. The company is a tool to create value for the brand. To understand what your customers think about the brand, you have to Listen.

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Market research = Listening. Market research is very good at finding answers to questions, but not so effective at generating insights.

Listening to the groundswell reveals new insights Consumers in the groundswell are leaving clues about their opinions, positive and negative, on a daily or hourly basis. If you have a retail store, they’re blogging about your store experiences, your selection and their favorite products. And it’s all there for you to listen on it. By itself, analyzing this activity has problems. To begin with, you won’t hear from everybody; you’ll only hear from people willing to talk. So listening to the groundswell comes with a huge caveat—you’ll gain new insights, but don’t assume that the people you hear from are representative. Another problem is the huge amount of information that appears online. You need to have technology that boiling down this information to something of value.

Two listening strategies There a lots of ways to listen to the groundswell, Google your product name along with the word sucsk or awsome. But to gain real insight, you’re better of working with vendors that provide professional tools, there are two basic ways to do this: 1. Set up your own private community - A private community is like a continuously running, huge, engage focus group. A natural interaction in a setting where you can listen in. 2. Begin brand montering - Hire a company to listen to the Internet on your behalf. Then have it deliver to you neat summary reports abouts what’s happening or push the results out to departments, like customer service, that can address pressing customer issues. To profit from listening, you need a plan to act on what you learn. Listening to the groundswell: What it means to you? Listening is perhaps the most essential neglected skill in business. Part of the reason is that it’s always been so hard. The result was the narrowest form of listening, market research. But in the era of the groundswell, listening is easy. Not listening, on the other hand, is criminal. Here is six reasons why you have to listen to your consumers: ●

Find out what your brand stands for - The difference between what you want to get across with your brand and the actual outcome that your customers provide.

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Understand how buzz is shifting - Start listening, and you have a baseline. Keep listening, and you understand change. Listening to the groundswell gives you the answer in high definition, on a weekly or even daily basis. And as more evidence accumulates that buzz is a leading indicator for sales, you’d better be paying attention.

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Save research money; increase research responsiveness - If you do a survey once in a while, listening is more expensive. But if your company has a regular research budget, some of it should go to listening.

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Find the sources of influence in your market - Who’s talking about your product? Are the bloggers more influential, or are the discussion forums? Once you find the influencers, you can cultivate them. This is energizing the groundswell.

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Manage PR crisis - If your company is going to suffer an assault from the groundswell you’ll hear about it earlier if you’re listening. Brand monitoring can function as an early-winning system, allowing your organization to respond before things get out of hand. In these situations, hours can count.

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Generate new products and marketing ideas - Your customers use your products and services all the time. They generate lots of intelligent ideas about those products and services, and they will offer those ideas to you for free.

Your listening plan Listening generally starts in the research or marketing department. Over time, though, listening will become a responsibility that is spread throughout an organization. Some practical suggestions that will help you succeed with listening to the groundwell: ●

Check the social technographics profile of your customers - Listening is most effective if your customers are in the groundwell to begin with.

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Start small, think big - For large companies with many brands, undertaking an overall brand-monitoring program can escalate into the million-dollar price range rapidly. Instead, start with a single brand and monitor that. Private communities also work best on a single brand or customer segment.

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Make sure your listening vendor has dedicated an experienced team to your efforts - Monitoring and community companies are new enough that it’s likely to be the CEO, head of marketing, or head of sales who pitches you.

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Choose a senior person to interpret the information and integrate it with other sources - Paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a community or monitoring service and failing to exploit the information is like buying a private jet and forgetting where you parked it. Listening generates insights, but they won’t sneak up and shout in your ears, you need to manage this resource.

How listening will change your organization Once you begin to listen and act on that information, your company will never be the same: ●

First, it’s likely to change the power structure of your organization

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Second, the instant availability of information from customers can become like a drug that companies can become addicted to.

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Third is the no-more-being-stupid factor. Every company has stupid products, policies and organizational quirks. These corporate elements persist because a top executive is biased towards them, because of tradition.

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Finally, you may think that listening is the easiest way to engage with the groundswell because it’s low risk, it doesn’t require you to put yourself into the conversation. But while listening is part of the conversation, every conversations includes talking as well. Listening to the groundswell and then speaking through traditional media and advertising is like responding to a friend’s whispered confidence with a bullhorn.

Chapter 6 - Talking with groundwell How talking with the groundswell differs from marketing Companies spent over 400 billion dollars on advertising in 2009, much of this was from TV commercials. This is not talking, this is shouting. Advertising thrives on repetition, the two main measures are: ●

Reach - The gross number of individuals screamed at

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Frequency - The number of times each one hears the shout

Advertising is about the mass and public relations aims at exposure in free media

Techniques for talking with the groundwell 1. Post a viral video - Put a video online, and let people share it. 2. Engage in social networks and user-generated content sites - Creating a personality within social networking sites like Myspace is one of the simplest ways to extend your brand reach. Turning it into a conversation is harder 3. Join the blogspot - Empower your executives or staff to write blogs. Integral to this strategy is listening to and responding to other blogs. 4. Create a community - Communities are a powerful way to engage with your customers and deliver value to them. They are also effective at delivering marketing messages, as long as you listen, not just shout. When brands should use social networks ●

Use the social technographics profile to verify that your customers are in social networks - If half of them is joiners, then marketing through social networks makes sense. Age makes all the difference here, Brands that appeal to consumers

ages thirteen to thirty-five must engage in social networks because their customers are already there. ●

Move forward if people love your brand - Brands who have loyal followers who will friend them

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See what’s out there already - Popular brands inevitably spawn friend pages and networks even before the company gets involved. Ex. Fan pages

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Create a presence that encourages interactions - Your fans want to connect to you, what will you put on your fan page? How will you respond to wall postings?

Tips for successful blogging The prerequisite for starting a blog is to want to engage in dialogue with your customers. Start with People and Objectives and if you know whom you want to reach and exactly what you want to accomplish, then you’re far more likely to succeed. Ten suggestions for beginning the dialogue: ●

Start by listening

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Determine a goal for the blog

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Estimate the ROI

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Develop a plan

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Rehearse

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Develop an editorial process

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Design the blog and its connection to your site

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Develop a marketing plan so people can find the blog

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Remember, blogging is more then writing

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Be honest

Four different ways to talk with the groundswell ●

Viral videos - Best for punching through the noise, the awareness problem

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Social Networks - Best solution for WoM problems,

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Blogs - Good with complexity problems. Not only can blogs help with this consideration, but they can also reassure people before, during, and after the sale.

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Communities - Resolves the accessibility problem. Some customers just don’t want to connect with you, they want to connect with each other.

How starting a conversation will change the way you think about marketing The awareness tactic will remain the same even with the groundswell, you have to get the customers attention before you engage in a conversation. The marketing people in the company will be the moderators to the conversation.

Chapter 7 - Energizing the groundswell What is energizing? Companies that isn’t just listening, and it’s not just talking, they energizing. They find enthusiast customers and turning them into WoM machines. Energizing the base is a powerful way to use the groundswell to boost your business. Word-of-Mouth succeeds because: ●

It’s believable - testimonials from customers are far more credible than any media source

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It’s self-reinforcing - Hear it from one person, and it’s intriguing. Hear it from five or ten, even if you didn’t know them before, and it has to be true

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It’s self-spreading - If a product is worth using, its word of mouth generates more word of mouth in a cascade that’s literally exponential

Techniques for energizing enthusiasts ●

Tap into customers’ enthusiasm with ratings and reviews - This works best for retail companies and others with direct customer contact

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Create a community to energize your customers - This works best if your customers are truly passionate about your product and have an affinity for each other, especially in business-to-business settings

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Participate in and energize online communities of your brand enthusiast...