The Groundswell Today – Not A Thing of the Past

Stay updated through the groundswell

            Business strategy books run the risk of becoming outdated due to periodical changes in the business world. Groundswell, however, has not fallen into that dilemma. Ina way, the groundswell sticks to traditional marketing objectives used by businessesfor the past decade but it knows how best to adapt to changes. We are the user, moderators, facilitators…however you want to call us…of the groundswell. It is there for us to appropriate for the benefit of our company and customers. In conclusion to the Groundswell book, Li and Bernoff describe the evolution of the groundswell as the ‘ubiquitous groundswell’. “The net result of all thisaccelerating activity is that the groundswell is about to get embedded withinevery activity, not just the computers, but on mobile devices and in the realworld”. This ultimately means that social networks will connect people with the groups they care about.

            Don’t you think that everyday, we push the cyber boundaries of the groundswell and are taken by surprise? I certainly know from my personal experience that the future of the groundswell is happening everyday. I receive immediate updates on my iphone of new emails, I tweet to my followers and I geotag my instagrams. Throughout all of my social media activity, I am constantly learning something new. I am assimilated into social media, but I would not that that I am fully assimilated. “All that’s missing is participation – by more people, and by morecompanies – and that’s coming. Rapidly.” Li and Bernoff also remind us that it is not about the technology, because if we were to focus on that aspect alone, companies would get nowhere and companies will lose control. Their social media marketing strategies will be “outdated” if technology was a priority.

It is also important to learn from other social media marketing gurus. Tim Leberecht, chief marketing officer at Frog, helps to spark and nurture new thinking among marketers all over the world by teaching them “3 ways to (usefully) lose control of your brand”. First, you can give people more control through collaboration to create new ideas (embracing). The second, is to give people less control with more meaning. Giving people less control counters the abundance of choice that customers might have online. Letting employees and customers interact limits that radical openness of the company (speaking). The third is to stay true to the brand’s true self. Do you think your company could live by these three advices?

The groundswell can help any business, no matter which stage of success or failure they are at. From a dying business to a thriving one, the groundswell is always there to help. Patagonia is a outdoor clothing company that released a daring sustainability campaign online and offline called “Don’t Buy This Jacket”. It is a part of their mission to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis. “It would be hypocritical for us to workfor environmental change without encouraging customers to think before they buy.” Patagonia is honest with their consumers, so much so that they are willing to address the need to reduce consumption event though they thrive on product sales. They used the groundswell, like blogging, to spread this campaign and their website to gather pledges from enthusiastic fans. They have acknowledged the reality that brand identity and staying true to their mission is put on a pedestal online. They are marketing their brand’s transparency and it is working.  

The future of the groundswell is what is happening right now, how we are using it today, and not what we can predict it will do tomorrow. Taking risks involve making immediately decisions and the groundswell encourages that because of its unlimited possibilities and outcomes. Patagonia took a might big risk. I want to encourage companies to do the same but to understand your objectives thoroughly first before submerging into the groundswell. Make Li and Bernoff proud!

Li and Bernoff Groundswell Lessons summarized:

• Never forget that the groundswell is about person-to-person activity
• Be a good listener – listen to customers, employees, etc.
• Be patient – take that first step towards your journey, it will take time
• Be opportunistic – progress is progress even if it is small
• Be flexible – continue to adjust and learn from decisions
• Be collaborative - use support from colleagues and customers
• Be humble – understand that power in the groundswell does not belong to you

Please feel free to leave me any questions or comments.

Tweet Your Way to Success

Believe that twitter is more than just a 140 character status update

             Your favorite workout deserves a tweet. Your favorite brand of cheddar cheese deserves a tweet. What about a concert? Or a bad experience? Twitter integrated the concept of texting and social media in a way that transforms the way we communicate. Some people argue that social media may be sabotaging real communication. However, I believe that Twitter and other forms of social media provide an alternative platform for communication and strengthen it rather than 'sabotages' it. If you are a newbie in the Twitter world, you may not have been impressed or care about getting involved. I want buy your attention now and attempt to prove Twitter’s worth. Li and Bernoff, in Groundswell wrote that if you use it right, Twitter could be a force for connecting with your customers with the five groundswell strategy objectives: listening, talking, energizing,supporting, and embracing.

Co-founder of Twitter, Evan Williams, said that, “Twitter was originally designed as pretty much a broadcast medium, you send one message, it goes out to everybody and you receive the messages you are interested in. one of the many ways that users shaped the evolution of twitter was by inventing a way to reply to a specific person or specific message.” This proves that ‘listening’ to and ‘energizing’ your customers can ultimately help develop your product. Have I started to convince you that Twitter has so much marketing potential? Twitter has so much marketing potential that companies, like yours perhaps, need to take advantage of.

Begin by expanding your reach and richness. JUXT’s interactive billboard in Times Square NYC used Twitter in a innovative way to listen to their audience. JUXT was not selling a physical product but a concept or message. Their challenge: how to get customers to look at your media instead of others? Their solution was to make the audience the media and the Dunk Tank was born! The crowd-based gesture gameplay, social media and amazing creative features a camera on the crowd. The video feed and real time interactive elements to create media and draw crowds of people for the experience. The audience would use Twitter to vote for either the painted lady or the strong man, using either #dunkgirl or #dunkguy. The winner of the vote finds themselves on a diving board waiting to be dunked by the crowd that hits a beach ball into the Dunk Tank target. It exemplifies real time simple ‘listening’ because dunking decisions are made based upon what the audience want and are tweeting.

Special K is a food company that promotes healthy weight loss and inspires women to love themselves through their products. Special K energized the groundswell by integrating online marketing, Twitter, with real time marketing, a pop-up store. They took a risk people talk about their brand. Because of this, Special K received a lot of backlash from activist groups online targeting their use of genetically modified ingredients. Special K countered the backlash by strengthening their campaign with ‘The Tweet Shop’. It was a pop-up style store that turned social currency into real goods and positive sentiment. “Passers can walk into the store  sample the range of new cereal crisps and then tweet about them to buy a box to take home”. @Louinga said: ‘Having some rather nice SK Cracker crisps courtesy of #Tweetshop’ While ‏@CocoSchmitt: ‘OMG!!! You have to try Special K Cracker Crisps at the #tweetshop SOOOOOOOO good!!’ Each tweet from a customer reached their circle of friends, making it both a review and a peer recommendation. This is word of mouth marketing at its best! Tweeting for a box of cereal? Genius.

                  Twitter will be effective only if you choose a clear objective and develop a strategy to make progress toward that objective. Sold to Twitter for $15 million, Summize is an online Twitter search engine used to search and filter through any topics mentioned in tweets. Use this tool in your company to track your products, campaigns or services. Twitter works best when it is paired with other social networking sites. Have I convinced you that Twitter can do more than just let you update your status?

Please share any thoughts, comments or questions!

Survive and Thrive the Web 2.0 World

Don’t be afraid of the power of collaboration, know your objective

            The Internet has become a platform for us to show that in this digital era, we as the masses are in charge. Because of this ability for people to connect with each other, it has fuelled a revolution of powerful online communities that often dominate the offline world. Humans have always naturally been attracted to other humans through what they find they share in common. From tribes in South Asia to the Vikings in Scandinavia, these communities were brought together because of a natural instinct to form relationships. Relationships are what many of us are good at right?

In the book Groundswell, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, describes the ‘groundswell’ as “a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from the traditional institutions like corporations”. Traditional businesses and nations succeeded only by defeating, destroying and dominating competition at all costs. If this description fits your company, you should continue to read this blog. I'm going to let you in on a multi-billion dollar marketing strategy: collaborative measures made possible with Web 2.0.

In 2005, Howard Rheingold said that a new story is beginning to emerge, “corporation, collective action, and complex interdependencies play a more important role, and the central but not all important role of competition and survival of the fittest, shrinks just a little bit to make room”. He continues to add that human communication and society have been evolving to collaborate, which later resulted in wealth. In the many-to-many era, every desktop is now a printing press, a broad casting station, a community and marketplace. You should learn how to best use social technologies in order to benefit you or your organization.

Ebay found its niche of creating a marketplace where people can easily be both the seller and the consumer. Wikipedia is a non-profit encyclopedia developed, updated and edited by anyone on the web. NGOs have put up their problems on Third World Countries on the Internet to be solved by university students all over the world. Yes, we are the all-powerful masses that threaten companies but at the same time, we are also necessary! They need our collaboration as much as we need theirs. Rheingold also mentions that these companies enrich others not because of altruism but because they are also enriching themselves. This is turning the Prisoner’s Dilemma game into an assurance game where neither side wants to trust the other but once proven trustworthy, they will cooperate.

Let me first explain that the Prisoner’s Dilemma is a game theory coined to describe why two individuals might not cooperate, even if it appears that it is in their best interest to do so. With social technologies, it is in the best interest of both the company and their audience to collaborate to generate more wealth or awareness. Of course there are risks involved with bolding sharing information online. What business decisions do companies make that are risk-free? Hardly any. Making information ‘open source’ means that your product or details about it are posted for anyone and everyone to access and use. Before you start taking big risks, it is important to understand the objectives behind the use of social technologies. Li and Bernoff came up with 5 objectives that companies can pursue in the groundswell:

Listening: use the groundswell for research and to better understand your customers

Talking: use the groundswell to spread messages about your company, if ready to extend your current digital initiatives

Synergizing: find your most enthusiastic customers, use the groundswell to supercharge the power of their word of mouth

Supporting: set up groundswell tools to help your customers support each other

Embracing: integrate your customers into the way your business works (using their help to design your products)

It is good to be selective about what objectives apply to your company. It is a matter of appropriating them strategically that will help your company reach the top! The objective to embrace is well exemplified with the Toronto-based gold mining company Goldcorp. Goldcorp had come to a halt with a staggering amount of debt, exceedingly high costs of production and a bad gold economy. Goldcorp’s in-house geologists concluded that their fifty-year old mine in Red Lake, Ontario was out of gold and that it was time to terminate all operations. CEO Rob McEwen did something unheard of in their industry: “He published his geological data on the Web for all to see and challenged the world to do the prospecting.The "Goldcorp Challenge" made a total of $575,000 in prize money available to participants who submitted the best methods and estimates.”

The Internet became a home to Goldcorp’s 400 megabytes of information on their 55,000 acre property. Their challenge integrated some 1,000 participants from 50 countries who got busy with Goldcorp’s data. It wasn’t long before submissions from all over the world were shared with the Goldcorp headquarters. It was like Christmas when Goldcorp began receiving copious amounts valuable information. McEwen said “We had applied math, advanced physics, intelligent systems, computer graphics, and organic solutions to inorganic problems. There were capabilities I had never seen before in the industry. When I saw the computer graphics, I almost fell out of my chair." Since the challenge, participants identified 110 targets and 8 million ounces of gold have been mined (worth $3 billion). WOW. It saved their company. Li and Bernoff also state, "people connect with other people and draw power from other people, especially the crowds. Internet allows people to draw strength from each other." Their objective was to embrace and they did this successfully! 
The application of the Web 2.0 theory of collaboration is not always possible with every company but it is important to identify your objective before pursuing the collaborative action of the masses online. Li and Bernoff's identifying objectives can be one  If you are a marketer for your company, be open to connecting, interacting and collaborating with your audience members online. You never know when you may need the power of the masses!