Groundswell Book Review

My overall impression of groundswell is very positive. The authors explore social media solutions for many aspects of business and do it in an easy understandable way. They also include great case studies on companies like Lego, Sony, Dunkin Donuts, UPS and Dell just to name a few that we are all familiar with. Their description of Dell's movement from Hell to IdeaStorm is great. It took a crisis to get Dell started and then they took the strategy of working on one thing at a time, and making sure in the future they started hiring the right people that could make their groundswell happen I think it is because this and the other case studies in the book tend to revolve around individual people. This book is written to corporate America more than smaller businesses and entrepreneurs. It suggests some of the most expensive options out there to build social technology solutions and track your brand online.

Li and Bernoff break down social technology users into 6 categories, The Social Technographics Ladder: who creates, who reacts, etc? This is a helpful guide There are content creators in every demographic, after all. groundswell is great for helping you generate a plan of action. But one of the keys here is creativity and capturing the imagination and ownership of your audience. You and your company will have to try different social tools because what works for some might not work for others but at least the book gives you the master template to get started.

This is definitely a book about strategy. You won't find in-depth discussions of the technologies they are introducing, but you will find enough detail to give you both a basic understanding of what it is (blog, wiki, viral video, tags), and, more importantly, what its impact is on traditional institutional power structures. This is one of the features of the book I really liked. The clear discussion of how social technologies impact power relationships is also quite good. While the authors keep their discussions clear and simple, there is a lot of thought going on underneath the main theme. That was satisfying to me, as too many business books seem like fast food, quick and easy, but with an empty core.

Not all case studies were successful. One company failed totally to engage in the groundswell. This company decided to start a corporate blog led by someone who was both familiar with corporate communication and investor relations experience and have blogs posted from executive leaders. The planning time was eight months without one single post so it is obvious to much planning and not enough postings were the problem. So, the project was introduced again only this time they basically started from the bottom up. They recruited someone who was already blogging and built the corporate blog basically from bottom to top. Now everyone was part of the groundswell.

Finally, they address one of the thorniest issues of social technologies - ROI. In every section, they attempt to assign real numbers, based on the case studies, as to how ROI is calculated. While acknowledging the difficulty of measuring engagement, and the lack of professional consensus on measurement techniques as a whole, they do offer useful guidelines and examples.


Bottom line: This is an excellent strategy primer for senior managers and executives seeking to better understand the changing world of marketing and communications in the face of social technologies (and a serious wake-up call to the reluctant ones among them). It provides a variety of planning and action-oriented checklists and highlights potential pitfalls. Most importantly, the book is designed to help managers put together a strategy based on people and relationships vs. technology. In the end, as the authors remind us, it is the relationships that count. I think if we follow the example below we will all be part of the “groundswell”