What did Groundswell mean to you?

I know from meeting and working with many of you that Groundswell has been useful. People who read it say some very nice things about what it did for them . . . and what happened whey they gave it to their boss.

Well, we're finally doing a paperback edition. It will include two new chapters -- one on Twitter, and one on the stages organizations go through as they adopt more social applications.

It will also include a few words from you.

I'd love to hear what Groundswell meant to you or did for you. Just add a comment to this blog post, or send a tweet with the hashtag #groundswell. We'll include a bunch of them in the paperback edition.

We're not looking for the biggest names here -- just sincere words from real people. I can't wait to see what you say. Needless to say, if we use your quote, we'll send you a copy. (It's due out in June.)

And finally, with as much humility as I can muster: thank you. Without you, I'm nothing.

Photo: http://www.territoriocreativo.es

 

Strategic generosity: Who, how, and why to give out free stuff.

by Josh Bernoff

(Reprinted from Ad Age DigitalNext.)

This is a big week for me. Our book Empowered, with advice about how to manage your company in the age of empowered customers, is about to hit the shelves. We’ve put in place a bunch of word of mouth programs and as I reflect on them, I am hoping there is a lesson regarding generosity for marketers selling just about anything.

Giving out free stuff is a time-honored marketing technique. It can also be very expensive, and is not necessarily effective. The reason is that people treat free stuff as throwaway stuff and it often doesn’t change their mind about a brand. (Think about all those conference bags with logos on them – do they actually work?)

Here’s my fundamental principle for giving out free stuff:

Give free stuff to people who will use it, like it, and talk about your brand as a result.

Call it "strategic generosity."

Here are a couple of examples from our book launch.

• We made Empowered available free on Kindle for the first week. (Go ahead, click and get your own copy through Friday September 10.) Why? Because (1) people with Kindles are more likely to talk to others about their purchases – we have data to prove that – and (2) the limited-time offer drives action. We are already starting to see reviews, and there are hundreds of Tweets, generating awareness for a brand-new product. Thousands have now downloaded the book, and it’s hovering around No. 6 in the list of free Kindle books – the only business book in the top ten. New: As Seth Godin just wrote about free Kindle books (including this one) in his blog, "When the marginal cost of the interaction is zero, the marketing opportunities of spreading an idea increase dramatically."

• We’re doing a free Webinar on Friday. (If you want to sign up, do it here.) Why? Because some people want to learn with video and audio and slides, not just read. It gives my coauthor and me a chance to make a personal connection. To save money, we’re doing this with audio on the computer and instead of a phone bridge. If you want to save money, do it in ways that don’t compromise the elements that get people talking.

• We recruited people with Twitter to do reviews on Amazon, and then gave out 100 advance review copies of Empowered. (Sorry, all those copies have already been distributed.) We think The Twitter audience is the one most likely to accept our message and to talk about it. In contrast to publishers’ typical broad free book mailings, this one has a defined target – Amazon reviews. We designed the program so people would take their review to promise seriously. To see if this is working, check our Amazon reviews in the coming weeks – those books are just reaching the reviewers right now.

Here’s the lesson for marketers. If your free-stuff and sampling programs are just geared towards getting people to try your products and remember your name, you can do better. Concentrate on the customers most likely to talk – Twitter users, bloggers, social network denizens – and give them advance access to your products and ways to find the greatness in it. Then they’ll do a lot of the marketing for you.

Empowered free on Kindle this week. Why we're not crazy.

by Josh Bernoff

Starting today and continuing until this Friday September 10, you can download Empowered to your Kindle at no charge.

You want to know how to manage your company in the age of empowered customers, don't you? If you've got a Kindle, what's stopping you?

Now to the other question. Are we crazy?

Some people have told me that giving away Empowered on Kindle makes it seem worthless. Or that I'm giving up revenue.

But I'm gambling on a different outcome.

I think the book is going to unleash a lot of HEROes. I would like to see thousands of you read it, get inspired, energize your customers, and transform your companies. I would love it if you got sufficiently excited to tell somebody else. Go ahead, start something.

I would like it very much if you would prove me right. If you do, plenty more authors and publishers will do this. Reward my faith in you. Download the book and read it now. Then review it, talk about it, tweet it.

Note: If you have an iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Mac, or PC, there are Kindle apps for those devices, too. So you can get it free as well.

And if you prefer print, we love you, too. You can buy the book at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or your local bookstore. It will be everywhere by next week.

Note: the free Kindle download offer is available in the US only. The Kindle version of Empowered is available in other geographies as well, but it is not free outside the US.

Photo by LenEdgerly via Flickr

Great new goodies for Empowered readers

by Josh Bernoff

Maybe you've noticed that our Web site has become Empowered. This is in preparation for our book launch on September 14, and it means a lot more than little lightning bolts in the graphic design. We have a few new tools for you to play with now. You can think of this as a tour of the new site (go ahead, poke around) or a bunch of new goodies intended to help out companies and highly empowered and resourceful operatives -- HEROes -- within them.

Some highlights:

• A new tool to help you evaluate your projects. We've taken the effort-value evaluation (EVE) from the book and turned it into a widget. If you're about to start a technology-involved project -- a new community, a Facebook page, a mobile application, or the like -- answer a few questions and we'll tell you just what level of challenge you're in for. The tool emails you the results, so you can forward them to people you're trying to collaborate with or get approval from.

• Chapter 1 of Empowered for your review. Register with us to get access to Chapter 1 -- including cool stories from Maytag and Best Buy and the main thesis of the book. If you're already registered with Forrester, or if you're a client, you can just log in and download it.

• Case studies. It's the stories of HEROes that (I think) make Empowered compelling. That's a big part of what people told me they loved about Groundswell, and we've gone deeper here into what it actually takes to be a HERO in a big company. We've listed them to give you a peek into the folks, stories, and companies featured in Empowered.

• Follow our travels. Where Ted and I are speaking and you can meet us.

We'd love your feedback, especially on the EVE Widget.

Take our survey, score your HERO project (social media, mobile, or other tech)

by Josh Bernoff

That social media project you are working on. Is it worth it?

The iPhone app -- is it going to pay off, or just drag your job into the toilet?

Our new book Groundswell HEROes is about highly empowered and resourceful operatives (that's you, if you're considering, building, or managing a technology project that touches customers). As we reviewed these projects, we realized that people often have difficulty up front in identifying just what they are about to get themselves into. It's not just the value for customers that's in question, and it's not just the technical effort. It's the political effort -- all the people who have a stake and try to stop you or help you (or "help" you).

We devote a whole chapter to this, and we've also developed a tool for measuring projects. Answer a few questions, and then the tool tells you if the effort is in line with the expected value, and whether you've generated a cute little idea (class 1) or a major "shadow IT" effort (class 4). We call it a value-effort evaluation (VEE score).

The tool is in beta. I'd like your help in testing it. Here's what to do:

1. Click on the "TRY IT" button below to take the survey and see how your project stacks up. It works for projects you are about to undertake, or ones you are in the middle of, or ones you have completed.
2. Please take notes while taking the survey, if you see something that seems wrong or missing or confusing.
3. At the end of the survey, we'll provide you with a screen that shows a little insight into your project and the challenges you will be facing.
4. Please help make the tool better. There's a little box at the end of the survey, you can include feedback there based on your notes. Or add a comment on this blog. Or email me at jbernoff at forrester dotcom.

I think the tool will be helpful in clarifying the path you are on. I know you can help us make it better. Look for a much nicer version of this once the book is done.

Note: because the survey tool costs a small but nonzero amount of money per completed survey, we may have to shut this down if more than a thousand people take it. Unlikely but possible. We'll let you know.

Are you a Groundswell HERO?

In two years of research with people in marketing, sales, and other customer-facing parts of companies, here's what I've seen: it takes guts, caginess, political skills, and energy to launch something new. The people who do this are amazing people.

Like Boyd Beasley at Electronic Arts, who built a system so people could contact technical support from within the games his company creates.

Like Barry Paperno from FICO, who figured out how to get people involved in a community around, of all things, credit scores -- solving a regulatory problem and increasing sales at the same time.

Like John Bernier, who made it possible for Best Buy employees to solve customer problem through the Twitter tag #twelpforce.

In researching our new book, we've met a bunch of these folks and realized they are the future. They make change possible. They are Highly Empowered and Resourceful Operatives: HEROes.

Their creativity and perseverance make their success possible. We can all learn from them. And that is why we are making HEROes a central concept in our new book.

And it's not just employee HEROes we are profiling. It's also customer HEROes. Highly empowered and resourceful operatives in the marketplace are the customers who challenge your company. It's our basic premise that it takes an employee HERO to build systems that can deal effectively with customer HEROes.

This idea was so compelling, we've made it our new title.

GROUNDSWELL HEROES: Harnessing the Power Shift in Your Workplace and Marketplace

The content is still the same, but HEROes are the focus. We've interviewed a bunch of them. We'll be sharing their stories with you.

We'd love to hear your story, too.

Photo: Randy Son Of Robert

What Will Be In GROUNDSWELL HEROES

by Josh Bernoff

For several months now we've been researching "Harnessing the GroundswellGroundswell HEROes", the followup book to Groundswell. The focus is on both empowered customers (think "United Breaks Guitars") and empowered employees. In both cases, the empowerment comes from the pervasive social, mobile, video-enabled, cloud-propelled technology available to them.

A funny thing happened during the research, though. We found that all the employee examples were in marketing, sales, and customer support. Why? Because those customer-facing departments have both the budgets and the desire to connect with customers using the new technologies. And they are moving forward, in most cases without much involvement from their own IT departments.

In fact, it's the urgency created by empowered customers that's driving the employees to build their own solutions. So we came to this principle:

If you want to succeed with empowered customers, you must empower your employees to solve their problems.

Whether it's Zappos, Best Buy, or Intuit, staff are building solutions to help their customers, and not just in customer service. THAT is what the new book is about. (It's a relief to have figured this out, believe me.)

Based on this, here's a revised table of contents. Look for the book next year from Harvard Business Press.

HARNESSING THE GROUNDSWELL: Empower your employees to solve customer problems

GROUNDSWELL HEROES: Harnessing the Power Shift in your Workplace and Marketplace

by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler

PART I: THE TREND

Chapter 1. Empowered people and what to do about them. How customers got so much power. Four forces: mobile, video, cloud, social. Empowering staff to solve customer problems.

PART II: YOUR CUSTOMERS

Chapter 2. Customer heroes. A new metric on the value of your customers. Customer word of mouth and media.

Chapter 3. Reimagining customer service. Customer voice. Service is now marketing. Social CRM.

Chapter 4. The mobile imperative. Pervasive information empowers customers. Using mobile information to create loyalty.

Chapter 5. Mobilizing fans. Amplifying promoters and blunting detractors. Efficient ways to enable fan voices.

PART III: YOUR PEOPLE

Chapter 6. Employee heroes. What empowered staff can do. Technology projects -- matching effort to results.

Chapter 7. Is your organization ready? Measuring employee empowerment. Do your staff feel they have permission? Are they ready to solve customer problems?

Chapter 8. Helping people work together. Collaboration and innovation tools. Social technology for the enterprise.

Chapter 9. Leadership for constant innovation. What management can do to encourage innovation and empower employees.

PART IV: YOUR TECHNOLOGY

Chapter 10. How IT can empower your people. How to say yes. Select, scale, and socialize.

Chapter 11. Empowering people safely. When to say no. Empowering people while managing risk.

PART V: YOUR FUTURE

Chapter 12. The future of the groundswell.

***

Now all we have to do is write it. Look for case studies and lots of data in the coming posts.

Note (12/21): We changed the title around the concept of HEROes (highly empowered and resourceful operatives).

Want to give your clients signed copies of Groundswell for the holidays?

Groundswell (the book) continues to spread. What excites me most is the number of times I hear "I gave copies to my staff/clients/customers to help them understand the trend." If you did this, I humbly thank you.You are the reason the book is still spreading 18 months after publication.

If you were thinking of doing this, let me gently encourage you by signing (up to 100) copies for your clients. I'll ship them back to you for free, too. We did this last year and people loved it, so why not do it again? Here's how it works:

• Email my research associate, Jenny Wise (jwise at forrester dot com) and copy me (jbernoff at forrester dot com) to let us know you're participating. Jenny can also answer any questions you might have.
• Buy at least 5 copies from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, 800 CEO READ, or your favorite book supplier. Can't sign more than 100 copies per customer, sorry.
• Ship the books to us at Jenny Wise, Forrester Research, 400 Technology Square, Cambridge, MA 02139. Telephone contact number 617 613 6000. Please get them to us by 15 December.
• I will sign them and add a short message of your choice. Nothing too salesy, please (think "Thrive in the Groundswell" not "My company is so great").
• We will ship them back you (any US address) at our expense within two business days of receiving them.

Hope to hear from you soon!

Groundswell Wins AMA's Berry Prize for Best Marketing Book

Just a quick note to thank the American Marketing Association for recognizing Groundswell with its 2009 Berry-AMA book prize for the best book in Marketing.

The association recognized Groundswell with these words:

Groundswell hit a real ‘sweet spot’ with the selection committee. Not only does it deal with crucial, cutting edge set issues of importance to both large and small firms, but it does so in very pragmatic fashion. Li and Bernoff present a very well-integrated framework for dealing with the array of decisions that must be made, and they provide vivid and compelling examples of the various ‘new media’ at work.

I'm truly humbled by this award, especially since it beat out "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely, which is truly a great book. In the year and half since Groundswell was published, I've enjoyed working with lots of marketers -- that's the most rewarding thing.

I feel a debt at this moment to Charlene Li, my coauthor, and to all of you in the groundswell who continue to help me see what matters to marketers. Keep doing great work, and I'll keep writing about it.

Announcing our next book "Harnessing the Groundswell"

by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler

We've begun work on Forrester's next book about how technology changes business. While "groundswell" is in the title, the new book is not quite a sequel. Instead, it focuses on individuals empowered by technology -- both employees and customers -- and how businesses can efficiently turn them into a force for better performance.Here's a short description:

Harnessing the Groundswell: Drive Your Business With Empowered Employees and Customers

Who are these empowered people? They're employees using simple technologies to solve business problems -- but in ways management hasn't sanctioned. They're customers, armed with a sea of ambient information and friend connections, who redefine your brand. Either way, empowered individuals are a problem for locked-down and unprepared managers stuck on control. "Harnessing the Groundswell" explains how to enable, select, scale, and socialize this energy -- that is, how to embrace empowered individuals and use them to drive your business forward.

Harvard Business Press will publish "Harnessing the Groundswell" in summer, 2010. If you don't know Ted Schadler, he's a long-time, accomplished Forrester Research analyst and vice president in our IT business.

As you read the table of contents below, ask yourself: do I know a company that's doing this well (or poorly?). We're looking for case studies, and not just successes. So if you know a company that embraces its technology problem solvers or its fans, let me (Josh) know and we'll follow up. I look forward to your comments.

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PART 1. Why Empowered People Are Driving Your Management Crazy
Individuals will always get the latest and best technology and services first. Why? Because that's the simplest path to market for device makers, publishers, social entrepreneurs, and other individuals. Because many of these technologies are mobile, they get into the enterprise regardless of corporate policies. This changes the dynamics of technology-led innovation forever.

Chapter 1. The forces that created empowered individuals
Chapter 2. How to act empowered (and how to manage people like that)

PART 2. Harnessing Empowered Employees
Individuals in the workforce bring their personal devices and experiences to work. The result? Innovation erupts in a thousand incremental, and sometimes disruptive, ways. With computing power available so cheaply in the Internet "cloud," employees can often create solutions with a budget they can charge on a credit card. Managers can either erect ever-higher walls in a fruitless effort to contain this disruptive energy or identify and harness the power of these improvements.

Chapter 3. A framework for managing empowered employees
Chapter 4. Empowered innovation [Leadership]
Chapter 5. Selecting and scaling solutions [IT]
Chapter 6. Socializing the enabled employees and solutions [Management/Collaboration]
Chapter 7. Hiring and retaining an empowered workforce [HR]

PART 3. Harnessing Empowered Customers
Your customers are using technology to gather any information they want. They have every Web site in the world to draw on, as well as their peers in social environments from Facebook to Twitter to blogs to customer ratings. And it's all coming to the mobile devices they take with them everywhere. A business that depends on the ignorance of its consumers is doomed. And in this environment, any service flaw is magnified and repeated endlessly. As a marketer, your best alternative is to become one of them – provide them with the very tools, information, and peer support they crave – and generate positive word of mouth through this enablement.

Chapter 8. A framework for managing empowered customers.
Chapter 9. Empowering customer service problem solvers [Customer Service]
Chapter 10. Empowering the mobile customer experience
Chapter 11. Selecting and scaling fans
Chapter 12. Socializing empowered customers: collaborating on innovation (10 pages)

PART 4. Leading the Empowered
Empowered people challenge management. The hierarchical management of large companies gets its power from standardization, rewards, and scale. But leadership in this new era does not mean being out of control. It means creating an environment where everyone knows the end goal and feels empowered to contribute, where attempts are lauded along with successes, and where scaling innovation is the true advantage.

Chapter 13. Leadership among the empowered
Chapter 14: The future

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I can't wait to read your reaction.