A few days ago I finished reading Charlene Li’s and Josh Bernoff’s terrific Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, published by Harvard Business Press in 2008. That’s old by social media standards, isn’t it? Yet Groundswell’s insights remain fresh and bold.
I plead guilty. I’m enamored of blogs, ratings and reviews, forums, Twitter and the tools it has spawned, Facebook, LinkedIn, RSS, YouTube and wikis. Yet what I found compelling were three ideas that apply across all of social media.
- “Concentrate on the relationships, not the technologies.”
- “A tool that enables new relationships in new ways will catch on faster than one that doesn’t.
- We live in a participatory culture in which “consumers do far more than consume—they create as well.”
This third insight initially came from Henry Jenkins. Yet Li and Bernoff go further in cataloguing the range of behaviors that consumer segments exhibit in this culture. They prescribe mapping our audience segment’s behavior before developing a social media plan.
Strategy at the Center
How many of us have rushed to set up our orchestra on Facebook and Twitter, only to treat them as one-sided, traditional media in which we broadcast but don’t listen? Groundswell makes the case again and again that marketing strategy drives success in this arena.
Thanks to Nicolette Beard of Savage for recommending this book to me.
Your thoughts?
