A Groundswell Either Your Marketing Is Riding The Wave or Its Under Water

This weblog allows me to take an armchair quarterback approach to a number of issues. This has both good and bad aspects. As has been said before, I don't own a business, so no risk, but I still find pragmatic truth in business methodology that should be applied in change agent organizations. I am also not working with any of the change agent organizations though I do contribute to such organizations as do many others. Yet, I am still thinking and writing about issues that I see of being important to such efforts. Truth is that I am taking advantage of not being involved with day to day organizational issues to study these issues from a detached perspective allowing me to think about them more broadly and find expanding interrelationships. Hopefully, by the time I am about to retire and try something new I will have learnt and even created something useful.

One of the challenges change-agent organizations involved in social-entrepreneurship and philanthropy face is getting their message out in an effective manner to everyone involved in the mission, financial supporters, volunteers, employees, partners, or clientèle. There are obviously numerous organizations that do an excellent job, but there is still a need to consider how this will evolve in the future. The tools of Web 2.0 offer both news means of leveraging marketing and conversely new forms of complexity. As has happened in the past, this weblog has looked to the world of business for some helpful insights.

This weblog has touched upon the concepts in Groundswell before with Withstanding A Groundswell Of Complexity. This is the book that is being cited numerous times throughout the blogosphere and seems to be the focal of a debate.

"Right now, your customers are writing about your products on blogs and recutting your commercials on YouTube. They're defining you on Wikipedia and ganging up on you in social networking sites like Facebook. These are all elements of a social phenomenon — the groundswell — that has created a permanent, long-lasting shift in the way the world works."

Further insight comes via Brand Autopsy by johnmoore back in April of this year The Internet is your Marketing Department.

GROUNDSWELL (Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff)

If you are reading this blog then you have a clue about the Groundswell that Charlene & Josh detail in GROUNDSWELL. Others you know in the office are probably clueless about this Groundswell. They have no clue about the power to be unleashed from embracing the Groundswell. They do not realize the Internet is your marketing department.

Another perspective comes from the Financial Times of London. Dangerous e-liaisons Review by Jonathan Birchall Published: June 4 2008 Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies.

The book, which naturally has its own online community, is built on the argument that not everyone uses the internet in the same way. There are

1. “creators”, who blog on their own web pages,
2. “critics” who post comments,
3. “joiners” who sign up for online communities,
4. “spectators” who read and watch, and finally
5. the unengaged “inactives”