Meet Josh and Charlene in June and beyond

by Josh Bernoff

We're now entering our third month of traveling the country to meet Groundswell enthusiasts (and potential enthusiasts) everywhere. June is packed full of appearances -- and if you're in New York you have no excuse to miss us since we'll be there practically continuously in June.

Austin
Thursday, May 29, 12:00 pm (central) Internet Strategy Forum
Josh will give a speech on ideas from Groundswell.

Austin
Friday, May 30, 12:00 pm (central) Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Summit
Josh will give a speech on "Turning the Social    Technology Groundswell to Your Advantage."

Silcon Valley (Mountain View)
Tuesday, June 3, 9:00 am (pacific) Under The Radar Social Media & Entertainment Conference
Charlene will serve as a judge at the Under the Radar Conference.

New York
Monday, June 9, 9:00 am (eastern) PRSA: The Digital Impact
Josh will deliver the opening keynote on "Groundswell" and public relations.

Los Angeles (Hollywood)
Monday, June 9, 10:00 am (pacific) Digital Media Summit/iHollwood Forum
Charlene will deliver a keynote speech on "Social Networking and the Transformation of Web Marketing"

New York
Tuesday, June 10, 10:00 am (eastern) Online Marketing Summit at DM Days
Josh will deliver the opening keynote on "The State of Online Marketing"

San Francisco
Tuesday, June 17, 10:30 am (pacific) Supernova
Charlene will be on a panel on "People: What We Know, and What It Means?"

New York
Tuesday, June 17, 11:15 am (eastern) Widget Web Expo
Josh will give a speech on "Using Widgets To Accomplish Business Goals"

New York
Wednesday, June 18, 8:30 am (eastern) Direct Marketing Idea Exchange
Josh will give a speech on Web 2.0 for marketers

New York
Thursday, June 19, 10:15 am (eastern) Meet Customers 3.0
Josh will give a speech on Groundswell

New York
Monday, June 23, 9:00 am (eastern) OMMA Social
Josh will give the opening keynote on "The State of Social Media"

New York
Monday, June 23, 4:00 pm (eastern) Forrester Finanical Services Forum
Josh will give a speech on "Social Strategy for Financial Services"

San Francisco
Tuesday, June 24, 11:30 am (pacific) Voice Peering Forum
Charlene will moderate a panel on "Federating Social Networks"

San Francisco
Monday, July 14, 4:30 pm (pacific) Ypulse National Mashup
Charlene will moderate a panel on "How to Successfully Reach Youth on Social Networks"

Portland (Oregon)
Thursday, July 17 Internet Strategy Forum
Charlene will give a speech on "Creating a Social Strategy That Will Work"

Washington, DC
Thursday, August 7, 9:30am (eastern) eTail 2008
Josh will be keynoting on the Social Networking day

We look forward to meeting you!

Three reviews to help convince your boss about Groundswell

by Josh Bernoff

Last week I asked how we could spread the ideas in groundswell to general business managers who don't yet "get it" -- like your boss.

This week it look like we are getting broader business and consumer press -- just what we need to get the word out.

Three examples.

First, the Financial Times, the business paper of record in the UK, reviewed the book, mostly in a positive way. We like this part:

The resulting book is not so much a manifesto or a dissection of online culture as it is a how-to manual for executives and mid-level managers trying to navigate this fast-changing and often confusing environment.

And this seemed oh-so-British somehow:

What Groundswell lacks in pop culture pizzazz it makes up for in wonkishness.

I've never enjoyed being called a wonk before. All in all a fair and fairly positive review.

Second,  I flew to Washington last week to  do the Diane Rehm show, an NPR radio program carried on 100 stations. This was the most mainstream of all media -- the host's questions and the callers' tended to focus on "why would anybody spend their time doing this stuff." But together with other guests including ning.com CEO Gina Bianchini, we 'splained it as best we could. I was skeptical about the power of a program airing at 11:00 am, but sales spiked right after the show aired so it must have worked. It's such a luxury to be able to express yourself in paragraphs rather than the teeny sound bites you get on programs on CNBC. If you want to know more, you can see a transcript or listen to the audio of the show here.

Finally, we are starting to rack up a pretty significant number of audio and video podcasts. I'd love to list them all but it's hard to keep track. This one, from Marketing Voices and podtech.net, is probably the most highly produced, and I like it (and you can see how Charlene effortlessly connects with the audience while I have to work at it).

Based on the traffic to this site and our microsite there is no dominant source of traffic. We have succeeded so far by trying just about everything. Nearly all the reviews anywhere -- in blogs, on Amazon, in Twitter -- are positive. Word is spreading, but slowly. Should you happen to know the key to unlocking the mass business market, by all means share. We're listening

Data chart of the week: social profiles for elements of a segmentation

by Josh Bernoff

So far, all of our Social Technographics Profile examples have used consumer behavior or attitude variables, like a comparison of car owners by brand or an analysis of Alpha moms. But we're finding, increasingly, that clients don't want to hear about the profile of the customers. They want to hear about a profile of their customer segments.

Most companies that sell to large numbers of people have segmented their customers. A retailer analyzes its shoppers and finds some come for convenience, some for price, and some for selection -- and some because their mom shopped there. Or an electronics manufacturer creates low-end easy-to-use products for the technology laggards and high-end sophisticated products for the early adopters.

Segmentation is smart if you use it to design products and marketing plans for different groups of customers. If you're growing a product line, it may be essential. Typically, a research project leads to customer insights, which leads to a segmentation, which leads to actions based on those segments. So when creating a social application for these segments, you need to ask -- which strategies apply to which customers?

Here's a good example. A large communications company had already segmented its customers and came to us with segment descriptions. Using the descriptions, we profiled three of the segments. The results are shown below. (The client's name and the descriptions of the segments are proprietary, I can't share them.)

What would you do if these were your customer segments?

Here's what we told the client.

First, the two segments shown here in blue are extremely active with social technologies -- some of the most active groups we've seen. We recommended creating groups within Facebook to engage them, building idea communities, and identifying and energizing customers by monitoring blogs and social networks. Failing to engage with these customers is a big mistake. Furthermore, although the company had identified two separate segments, we recommended using the same programs for both segments, since they have such similar profiles.

The third segment, shown in orange, features 61% Inactives and only 20% Joiners -- well below average. We recommended spending marketing money on this segment elsewhere, rather than on social programs, which would be difficult to get going with a profile like this.

One final note. Both in this project and another similar one for a beverage company, we found the companies had difficulty identifying their own segments! The first time this happened, I found it strange, but twice made me think it's a pattern. For any companies out there planning or implementing a segmentation, remember: you need some mechanism to identify who's in those segments. If you think segementation leads to insight and then you're done, you'll may find it frustrating (as we did) to take those segments further into a realm like targeting for social applications.

How to read a business book (according to Seth)

by Josh Bernoff

Seth Godin, in his post How to read a business book, recommends:

1. Decide, before you start, that you’re going to change three things about what you do all day at work. Then, as you’re reading, find the three things and do it. The goal of the reading, then, isn’t to persuade you to change, it’s to help you choose what to change.

2. If you’re going to invest a valuable asset (like time), go ahead and make it productive. Use a postit or two, or some index cards or a highlighter. Not to write down stuff so you can forget it later, but to create marching orders. It’s simple: if three weeks go by and you haven’t taken action on what you’ve written down, you wasted your time.

3. It’s not about you, it’s about the next person. The single best use of a business book is to help someone else. Sharing what you read, handing the book to a person who needs it... pushing those around you to get in sync and to take action--that’s the main reason it’s a book, not a video or a seminar. A book is a souvenir and a container and a motivator and an easily leveraged tool. Hoarding books makes them worth less, not more.

Effective managers hand books to their team. Not so they can be reminded of high school, but so that next week she can say to them, "are we there yet?"

I wish everyone would do this. Groundswell is designed to be used just like this -- as a call to action for business use of social applications, with specific details on how to do it.

Are you reading Groundswell this way?

What could we do to help you with this?

How could this help with spreading the word?

Discuss.

Help me get your boss to understand social technology

by Josh Bernoff

Do you ever get the impression that all of us "social media" types are just talking to each other? That we are reinforcing each others' ideas and supporting each other, but that we keep talking to the other insiders?

That the rest of the world looks at us as if we have three heads?

Take a look at this diagram, which I guess was inspired by the graphic on the cover of the book.

The inner circle is us. The insiders, the people who know about this stuff. We talk a lot to each other. We Twitter. We blog. We build communities and start companies. We (that is, you) have bought thousands of copies of Groundswell and raised it to within the top 300 books on Amazon. Thank you.

I know many of you like the book from the dozens of blog posts and hundreds of tweets I read. If I read nothing but Twitter I would think Groundswell was bigger than Indiana Jones.

Outside this circle, in the larger circle, are general business managers. Most of them have heard of Facebook and Web 2.0, but they don't pay that much attention to it. They don't have a way to understand its relevance for them. Despite our most diligent efforts most of them have never heard of Groundswell.

Looking at these two circles, I have seen that I need your help, and you need mine. So let's work together.

Here's why you need my help. You can't get funding until the people in the outer circle begin to believe. That includes your boss, your CMO, your CFO, and your CEO. It includes the other managers you work with and your agencies and partners, too. Life would be a lot easier if they understood.

Groundswell is designed for these people. If they would read it, they would understand. And as much as I love it when people like Mike Walsh say they will buy hundreds of copies, I really think they should buy the book for themselves.

And that's why I need your help. I'm not asking you to buy a copy for all the managers you know (although I wouldn't complain). I'm asking for your ideas on how to reach these folks. How can I energize the insiders to help spread the word?

Think carefully. Because we're already twittering and blogging and Facebooking and using all the tools we use . . . and we are reaching each other. This is great. But how do we reach them? How do we reach the managers who aren't using social technology?

Somewhere in the collection of very creative people reading this -- in your collective brains -- is an idea of how we can make general businesspeople aware of Groundswell and raise their consciousness, not just about the book, but about the phenomenon of the groundswell. Sure that would be good for me. But it would make your lives a whole lot easier, too.

Think about it a little. Comment here, or, even better, please join the discussion we've set up. If you join me you become a Groundswell insider. All I need are your ideas.

Thanks. I know we can do this, but I need your help.

Free Groundswell books for blog reviewers

By Charlene Li

Thanks to the generosity of our publisher, Harvard Business Press, we have 100 copies of “Groundswell” to give away to the first 100 bloggers who respond, first come first served. It doesn’t matter what kind of blog you write – if you think your audience would be interested in a review, we’d like to send you a copy. In the end, it’s up to you to decide if you’d like to write a review – no strings attached.

To get a copy, send an email to  [address removed as all copies are gone] with the subject line “Blog review copy”. In the message text, include your blog’s URL, your name and snail mail address.

And if you’re a member of the “regular” press and interested in getting a review copy, we have a different set of books reserved for you – please send an email to jsymons@forrester.com with the subject line “Press review copy”, the name of your publication, your name, and mailing address.

You’ll get a confirmation email that you’ll be receiving a free copy, and you’ll soon have Groundswell in your hands!

Update: And if after you've read the book and you're interested in an interview (phone, email, IM), I'm happy to do one with you. Ditto for podcasts and videos. Thanks to comment from Andrea for the suggestion/reminder!

Podcast with Clark Kokich, CEO of Avenue A | Razorfish on CEO blogging

By Charlene Li

I had the opportunity to sit down with Clark Kokich, the CEO of Avenue A |Razorfish last week at AARF's Client Summit in New York City. One of the things we discussed was AARF's great use of social technologies within the organization -- in fact, it's a featured case study within the Groundswell book, in the chapter entitled "The groundswell inside your company".

One of the things Clark does is to blog regularly -- but internally to his employees. Clark uses his blog and the company's internal wiki to stay in touch with his 2,300 globally distributed employees spread across 20 offices in 8 countries. But more importantly, Clark uses it as a way to personally connect with employees and to spread the kind culture he would like to see develop.

In the interview, Clark talks about the role and importance of his blogging activities, how he carves out time to blog, and the importance of frank feedback.

Length: 5 minutes 30 seconds

Recorded on May 14, 2008 at the Avenue A | Razorfish Client Summit, New York, NY

How do you measure the value of social applications?

by Josh Bernoff

As you can see in my interview with Jackie Huba, I think the most common mistake made by people developing social applications is this: not focusing on objectives.

Why? Because unless you focus on objectives, you can't tell if you're accomplishing anything. And unless you can prove you are accomplishing something, your project will be cancelled.

OK, then, assuming you have focused on objectives, you should be measuring your results. But what to measure?

Bottom line profit?

Top line -- sales increases?

Awareness?

Click-throughs? Time spent? Page views?

It all depends on what your objective is. I'd like to tell you all the answers but in fact I am researching this right now. This post is just a (slightly) clever way of getting you to help with the research so we can all benefit from each others' knowledge.

So, if you are actually building a social application for your company (or a client) take our survey right here. (If you are already in our interactive marketing panel or have already taken the metrics survey, thank you -- please don't take it again.) When you have completed the survey, we'll assemble it with everyone else's answers. I'll share the highlights of the research with all of you, and those who took the survey will get a copy of the complete results.

How do you measure the value of social applications?

(If you are working on an application and you'd like to tell us more about how you measure it, please email my research associate Scott Wright at swright at forrester dotcom. We'd love to hear from you.)

Data "point" of the week: Data alone is not enough

by Josh Bernoff

I've been thinking about data lately. This is partly because of Bill's comment on our last Data Chart of The Week (Seniors) and also the responses we got to Part 1 of our recent Webinar series. In the Webinar, I chose to focus almost exclusively on several Social Technographics Profiles -- data about how different groups of people use social technologies -- and while most of the responses were positive, a few people responded that they were unsatisfied with the result.

Confession: I love data. I helped start Forrester's first consumer surveys, called Technographics, in 1997, and I love the idea that we can answer consumer behavior questions around the world now. As an analyst, I love having the ability to dive into data and find the answers to a client's behavioral or attitudinal question. And I find it endlessly fascinating to see how people's attitudes vary with age, or where they live, or from year to year. Having the ability to ask questions of the form "I wonder if people . . ." and actually get the answer is intoxicating. That's why data about People is the first step in the POST method for social technology strategy formation.

But data isn't the whole story. Data looks backward, and answers only questions you thought to ask. Surveys have biases. They have margins of error and sample size issues. I believe our surveys are the best, most comprehensive set of data available anywhere on technology. That said, if you start and end with data alone, you will go wrong.

That's why we always try to provide analysis along with, or driving, or surrounding the data we present, which creates the basis for intelligent decision-making.

There are experts on this stuff, most notably my colleague Brad Bortner. But I've learned a few things myself in a decade of research with consumers. So rather than present more data this week, I will offer up these bits of advice:

• Better to have data than to trust your gut. In the absence of data about your market, youi are driving blind. You intuition about your customers may be right, and it may not. (It's useful to remember that in every stock trade, one side expects the stock to go up and the other does not -- why are you so sure you are smarter than everyone else.) If you can get access to consumer behavioral data about what you're doing, then by all means study it.
• Data is not insight. What does it mean that 40 year-olds are twice as likely to create social content than 20 year olds? That depends on what you want to do about it. Use data to start and bolster your argument. Then ask, "Is there any other way to interpret this?"
• Check the source and the base. All Forrester data charts have a source (typically a survey) and a base (the group of people surveyed). The source will tell you when the survey was conducted -- and data is perishable, since people's attitudes change over time. The base us important to -- is it online consumers, people with mobile phones, or people in metropolitan China? Sample size is also important -- results from 200 people are interesting, but clearly not as as solid at results from 10,000. That's why I can tell you the social Technographics profile of people who own Mercurys, but not people who own Hummers -- we only reach a dozen or so of the latter.
• Protect against bias. All surveys have bias -- most notably, they reach only people willing to take surveys. Another common bias is "social desirability bias" -- people want to believe they are better than they are. This is why PBS gets higher ratings in diaries than when measured with a meter. Always ask "is there a bias here that could reduce the value of this data?"
• Beware of overinterpretation of a question. I will often show survey data in the form of a question and the percent who gave various answers. An audience member will ask "did they mean this, or did they  mean that?" It's a hard question to answer, since I wasn't in the brain of the person answering. Strictly speaking, they read the question and they gave the answer -- it's up to you to interpret. Similarly, just because people participate in discussion forums doesn't mean they want to talk about your products. Data gives you a feel for how people are thinking, but it's still up to you to engage them.

I promise to keep showing you data, but always with a context on what to do about it. What bits of advice do you have about working with data?

P.S. To language purists. I know the convention is to treat "data" as the plural of "datum" and all credible statisticians do so. I also know, in my conversations with businesspeople, that they often use "data" as a singular. Since that's who I talk to, that's how I use the word. "The data are" just sounds wrong to these people, so I avoid it.

Meet Josh and Charlene in May

(Updated with correct URL for MASS TLC Breakfast)

We continue our relentless drive to bring Groundswell ideas to you, whatever event you're attending. In May you can meet us at:

Thursday, May 1, 12:00 pm (eastern)
Young Presidents Organization Teleseminar

Half Moon Bay, California
Wednesday, May 7, 10:45 am (pacific) Ziff Davis CIO Summit
Charlene is on a panel "Web 2.0 and the CIO - Raising the Collaborative Intellect of Your Enterprise"

Beverly Hills, California
Thursday, May 8, 10:00 am (pacific) INMA World Congress
Charlene is giving a speech "Social Networking and Digital Migration: How Newspapers Can Position Themselves for Growth"

Las Vegas
Tuesday, May 13, 8:45 am (pacific) Community 2.0 
Charlene is giving a speech "Tapping Into the Groundswell: How To Create Your Community Strategy"

New York
Wednesday, May 14, 9:40 am (eastern) Avenue A/Razorfish Client Event
Charlene is giving a speech.

New York
Thursday, May 15, 5:15 pm (eastern) MIT Enterprise Forum
Josh is giving a speech about Groundswell.

New York
Friday, May 16, 8:30 am (eastern) Corporate Communication and Technology Conference
Josh is on a panel, "Using Web 2.0 to Deliver Business Results."

San Francisco Bay Area
Friday, May 16, 6:30 pm (pacific) Society For New Communications Research "Third Thursday"
Charlene Li will give a speech about Groundswell.

Boston
Tuesday, May 20, 8:00 am (eastern) MITX and Avenue A | Razorfish event
Josh is on a panel presenting ideas about the digital outlook for 2008.

Boston
Thursday, May 22, 8:00 am (eastern) Mass Technology Leadership Council Breakfast
Josh will give a speech on ideas from Groundswell.

Austin
Thursday, May 29, 12:00 pm (central) Internet Strategy Forum 
Josh will give a speech on ideas from Groundswell.

Austin
Friday, May 30, 12:00 pm (central) Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Summit 
Josh will give a speech on "Turning the Social    Technology Groundswell to Your Advantage."

(Looking at this schedule, I sure am glad there are two of us!)