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Review: Groundswell – Winning in a world transformed by social technologies

  • Article

Interested in Social Computing and how to work with that? Then I can recommend the book Groundswell – Winning in a world transformed by social technologies. The book is about the trend and how businesses can use and benefit from it. This is not about the underlying technology, but rather from a business viewpoint. Real life examples (case studies with ROI), also including the ones that failed, makes it easier to understand and to apply this in your company.

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies

Groundswell is defined as “A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations” in the book. What I found most useful in the book in addition to the real life examples, was the Social Technographics ladder and the POST framework

The Social Technographics ladder

The audience is segmented in 6 areas based on their activities in the groundswell. The higher in the ladder, then the more involved a person are in the groundswell. When you now how your customers (or employees) are distributed in the ladder then you know better what kind of tools (blogs, wikis, forums, etc) will work with your audience. You can profile your customers here

Click the image for more details

The POST framework

A four-step planning process is the POST framework. Briefly this is:

  • People. Who are your customers (use the profiler tool)
  • Objectives. What do you want to achieve. Many seems to forget this in their urge to have some social computing stuff.
    In the groundswell these can be Listening, Talking, Energizing, Supporting and Embracing
  • Strategy. What do you want to change, how will you measure it, who’s support do you need, and so on.
  • Technology. After you have decided the above; what applications should you build.

What about usage inside the company (enterprise usage)?

The book is primary about the groundswell for your customers, but there are a chapter at the end covering how this can be used inside a company.

 

Groundswell is written by two analysts in Forrester Research: Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. Join the conversation on https://groundswell.forrester.com/, where you also find social profile data for 2008.