Free Empowered Webinar September 10 -- how HEROes will transform your business

We'd like to come to where you work and talk to you about Empowered. All of you. All on the same day, Friday September 10, at 12:00 eastern time. Feel free to bring your lunch.

We want you to embrace the innovation that come from Highly Empowered and Resourceful Operatives -- HEROes, within your company.

As part of the launch of Empowered, we're presenting a free Webinar. In this Webinar, you'll hear about some of the incredible people we feature in Empowered -- like Leonard Bonacci, who turned 68,000 Philadelphia Eagles fans into stadium security allies, and Gerald Shields, the Aflac CIO who energized the people in his company to create social applications for partners and customers. This Webinar is for marketers, customer support people, Web developers, technology vendors, and IT people -- it covers the full range of advice that's in the book.

We'll provide insights into some of the main concepts in the book, including Peer Influence Analysis, the HERO Compact, and the HERO Index, which is a measure of how many HEROes there are in your your industry, your company, or your department.

It takes empowered employees -- HEROes -- to succeed in this world of empowered customers. We really do want to change the way organizations run so they can tap the power of those HEROes. This Webinar shows how you can join us on that mission.

Sign up here.

Detailed schedule information:

Date: 10 September

Time: 12:00 noon Eastern Time, 9:00 am Pacific Time, 1700 London Time, 1800 Central European Time

Duration: 60 minutes

Location: Your computer (we'll send you the link)

Technical note: this Webinar will use the sound on your computer, not a dial-in connection. It will also include video of us. We're using Sonic Foundry's MediaSite, which requires Microsoft Silverlight. To test your computer for compatibility, go here.

Polishing up the Groundswell site

I've enjoyed watched so many of you linking to and twittering about our little Groundswell microsite, because it means people are finding the site useful. Now that Groundswell's been out more than a year and has become a business including 18 analysts, we've got new goals for the Web site. The blog you are reading will continue, but we've added some new features to the site for you.

• There's a Consulting page which has details on how to work with us (speeches, workshops, projects, and data, for example). This also includes the long overdue Team page, so you can see all the analysts who work on Groundswell and our individual specialties. Go team!
• The Book tab still includes our graphics, videos, audio snippets, and other goodies, including the author bios (which used to be their own tab).
• The Calendar tab will include Groundswell speeches by the whole team, not just me.
• The Profile Tool tab includes something new -- a link to our widget with B2B users' Social Technographics Profiles. That new tool is embeddable --  you can put it on your own site. (That functionality is coming to the Consumer profile widget soon, too.)
• The Discussion Forum is just the same except for one thing  . . . we have a moderator, Zach Hofer-Shall, who is a researcher on our team. Zach's doing two things for us. First, he's clearing out the spam, so if you visited the forum and found it full of spam, we've fixed that. (And spammers, don't bother trying, Zach is vigilant against slime like you.) And second, he'll alert me and other analysts if there are posts there that ought to get a response from us.
• Finally, the big news -- the Forrester Groundswell Awards are starting up again for 2009. See the next post for details.

Meet you (and Tweet you) in Madrid and Rome in June

by Josh Bernoff.

Thanks to clients, I will be in Europe the week of June 1. I’ve blocked off some time to meet with you, if you’re interested. We’re also celebrating the publication of the Spanish edition of Groundswell (El Mundo Groundswell) and the Italian edition (L’onda Anomala). I’d like to show my publishers the power of the groundswell in Spain and Italy.

I’m looking for people who can organize Groundswell events in the evening on Tuesday 2 June in Madrid and Friday 5 June in Rome. What kind of event? A speech (if you have a good space) or a Tweetup in a restaurant come to mind. I’d just like to spend time with some Spaniards and Italians who are interested in the power of social technologies – and in connecting with one another.

You can reach me with comments on this post, through Twitter (@jbernoff), or by email (jbernoff at forrester dotcom). I look forward to seeing you in Europe!

Come to Orlando, become a smarter marketer at a big, big discount

by Josh Bernoff

I let Forrester's events team persuade me to use this space to promote our upcoming Marketing Forum in Orlando, April 23 and 24. Why? Because they are offering an incredible deal, people.

I've been to a dozen of these Forrester events and people always leave happy, because of the valuable content and the networking opportunities. The difference is, this year we're putting it on sale. We know your budget is hurting. We listened. And we cut the price.

Here are top five reasons to give this a look:

1. The topic is Using the Down Economy To Catalyze Marketing Change. So you'll leave with great ideas. We know it's a recession, we want you to succeed in it.

2. See great speakers like Marty St. George, SVP of Marketing for JetBlue, Greg Clayman, EVP of Digital Distribution for MTV, and Annis Lyles, VP of Media and Interactive for Coca-Cola North America. We pick speakers based on their relevance to the times and to marketers, and most of their time on stage is spent answering your questions (and ours). Plus great speeches from the two Forrester speakers, Shar Van Boskirk and Peter Burris.

3. Jeremiah Owyang, me, and most of our marketing analysts will be on-site, and attendees can set up one-on-one time with any of us -- or several of us. You won't find us all at one place anywhere else. I'd like to help you with strategy, but you'll have to come see me.

4. It's at the Disney Yacht and Beach Club in Orlando. That's a pretty nice place to getting educated.

5. The events team has cut $300 from the price and is now offering a free hotel night as well. I've never seen Forrester do this before. We want a full house, so you get a much better price.

You know you want to come. I'd love to see you in Orlando.

Join me in person February 18 and build your groundswell strategy

by Josh Bernoff

Briefly: if you're on the verge of developing a social technology strategy, or just want to know more about how to do it, we can help. We're holding a full-day workshop here at Forrester's Cambridge (Boston Area) offices on February 18. It's called "Marketing With The Groundswell In Tough Economic Times" and will include our latest cases studies and new (Q4 2008) data about marketers' investments in social technologies in a recession.

This is similar to the workshop I've done for companies including Wal-Mart, Charles Schwab, Rogers, and about a dozen others, but updated and revised. We use the POST method (People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology) to help you structure your thinking.

Top five reasons to come to Cambridge:

5. Get a full day immersed in social technology strategy insights, case studies, and examples, and work on your own strategy with help from analysts and fellow marketers.

4. Interact with 10 or 15 other marketers who are working on the same issues. (Our clients are, as they say in Boston, wicked smaht.)

3. Get a free signed copy of Groundswell or the Groundswell audiobook -- your choice. (I know you probably already have one, but you can give this to your boss or client with a personal note from me!)

2. Meet Sean Corcoran, our newest social technology analyst, who will be sharing insights from his agency work with Carat.

1. All that stuff you heard about how cold it is here in Boston -- don't believe it! It's cozy to bundle up, and seeing all those Harvard and MIT students walking around will make you feel warmer, or at least younger.

I know travel budgets are tight but at $2,500 this is way cheaper than having me come to your company for the day. See the agenda and sign up or email our events team. I can't wait to work with you.

Picking a community vendor? We've evaluated a bunch . . .

by Josh Bernoff

You know that Forrester analyzes technology to help businesspeople make decisions. You may not know just how detailed we get in that analysis.

My colleague Jeremiah Owyang has spent a whole lot of time in the last 4+ months looking at Community Software platforms from companies like Telligent Systems, Jive Software, Pluck, and Mzinga. This is what we call a "Wave" -- a rigorous comparison of vendors in a market. It includes not just having the vendors run through their features, but also reviews with their clients. Rigorous describes the methodology but also the experience; Jeremiah will tell you it takes a lot of diligence to do this right.

The Wave was published today. The full report is available to Forrester clients or you can pay for it separately. Alternatively, you can see the top-line results right here. In this chart the vendors that appear to right have the strongest long-term strategic position; those that appear toward the top have the best current offerings. In case you're wondering why we included these specific vendors, we used some criteria to identify those companies with the largest current client bases of major companies.

You can get a lot more detail on Jeremiah's blog post. He's going to be one busy boy helping companies make these choices, now that the Wave is out.

Above Graphic: Forrester Wave™: Community Platforms, Q1 ’09

A holiday gift that makes your clients smarter

by Josh Bernoff

If you were thinking that your clients, customers, or staff deserve a nice gift this holiday to remind them how valuable you are, may I not-so-humbly suggest a signed copy of Groundswell? Feel free to skip the rest of this post if you find this too self-promotional; otherwise, read on . . .

At around $20 a copy Groundswell may well be the cheapest way to help people understand the power of these new technologies. I can't give you a discount on the books (the publisher won't let me) but I can add the power of my personalized message to your clients or employees. Here's how it works:

1. This program is available to US addresses only.
2. Send an email to Angie Polanco at apolanco (at) forrester.com. Angie is a research associate on my team and will be coordinating this program. Copy me at jbernoff at the same domain.
3. Tell Angie how many copies you will be sending; minimum 10 copies. While you are responsible for getting the copies to us, we will ship them back to you free of charge for the first 100 copies of Groundswell about which we receive emails. Angie also needs your contact information including street address, phone number, and email.
4. Angie will tell you if your order is in the first 100 copies. If it is, we will send them back to you for free (ground shipping). If it is not, we'll still sign the copies but you need to pay the shipping costs back. Be prepared to share your FedEx account number with us for this purpose. If you want the books back more quickly you can pay for faster shipping.
5. Also tell us a short (140 characters?) message you'd like me to write above my signature. We'll reject anything too long or salesy; this is not an endorsement, and remember it's direct from me. Might I suggest something like "A few powerful marketing ideas can go a long way," for example.
6. Go to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, 800 CEO READ, or your favorite online book retailer and send the books to this address: Angie Polanco, Forrester Research, 400 Technology Square, Cambridge, MA 02139. Telephone contact number 617 613 6000. Books must arrive by 15 December for this promotion.
7. When the books arrive, I will add your message and sign them. Angie will return them with your selected shipping method within two business days.

Groundswell has already reached tens of thousands, but I'm hoping this promotion will allow us to reach an even broader mass of businesspeople with the groundswell message. I'm looking forward to hearing from you.

How to be a visionary

by Josh Bernoff

(My remarks on receiving the Visionary of the Year Award from SNCR, the Society for New Communications Research. As you can see, I bought "Charlene" with me, although she was feeling a bit "flat" last night.)

Let me start by saying I'm very sad that Charlene Li can't be here for real, since everything we did on Groundswell, we did together.

We were flabbergasted to get this honor and here's why: when we set out to write Groundswell, we explicity gave up on the idea of being visionary. Looking at the visionaries that came before us, notably the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto and Shel Israel and Robert Scoble, who wrote Naked Conversations, we decided early on that it would be tough to stake out a startling new area. Instead we decided to focus on how to make this concept of social technologies practical and useful. That's where the vision was needed.

So the first thing to learn about being a visionary is, don't start out trying to be a visionary.

The second thing I can share with you is that ignorance is vitally important. That's right, ignorance. I started out in 2007 with a very limited knowledge of the social world, and I think that naivete led me to see some things nobody else could see. Charlene was hardly naive about social technologies, but her own ideas needed to evolve to get us to the point where we could write a good book about it. The greatest advances in any field often come from people who are looking at it for the first time from a new perspective.

Third is testing your ideas. Everything in Groundswell was batted back and forth between the two of before it ever saw the light of day, and many of the ideas were tested as well on our blog and with clients. The weak ones were weeded out. The strong ones became stronger. That was essential to going further with these ideas.

Fourth is research. Everything in Groundswell is based on data we collected at Forrester, real world stories, and interactions with clients. Without that you're just makin' stuff up. It rings true because it is true.

Finally, vision doesn't mean a thing unless you can apply it. We've been all over the world talking about Groundswell, and people are using it. When I went to Wal-Mart and delivered it to their top management, they were creative in their reception of these ideas. That was encouraging. But the next day, they hosted some bloggers, and the bloggers have told me that they were still buzzing about the ideas and receptive to the new way of thinking. That means we changed minds in a place that matters. If you call that vision, I'll accept your judgment.

Thank you.

Photo by Shashi Bellamkonda. Charlene Li standup from photo by Thomas Hawk.

A few nice links

by Josh Bernoff

For my fans (yes, both of you):

My answers to Proust's Questionnaire, Hubspot version. (That's Marcel at left; he was the first one to answer the questionnaire, not the guy who created it.) This is my favorite part.

Person That Inspires You?

My father - who showed how to balance pride in your work with honesty and love. Bill Bluestein, the quintessential technology analyst, to whom Groundswell is dedicated. Isaac Asimov, who never stopped writing about everything. Regrettably, of these three, only my father survives.

Groundswell was chosen as one of Amazon's top 10 business books of the year. When you consider all the other great business books that came out this year, this is a nice honor. Hopefully we can get onto a lot of other year-end lists.

A couple of podcasts from Lois Paul & Partners' Beyond The Hype Blog. Here's an excerpt in which I speak about the political candidates' use of social technologies and my favorite things to blend.

My post about Barack Obama tapping the groundswell appeared in the Boston Globe.

Along these lines, if you're coming to the SNCR Awards ceremony, I promise to make things interesting.

Visionary of the year?! Thank you, SNCR.

by Josh Bernoff

In a development that left me breathless, SNCR (The Society for New Communications Research) has decided o give Charlene Li and me its "Visionary of the Year" award. We're getting honored along with the founders of Twitter for Innovators of the Year, and Dell for Brand of the Year.

I'm even more tickled by this since the manuscript for Groundswell, the book that led to this honor, was completed in November 2007, almost a full year ago. You try to be visionary with that sort of delay . . .

If you're not familiar with SNCR, it's a great organization that helps share research and insights on new developments in media and marketing. From their site:

The Society for New Communications Research is a global nonprofit think tank dedicated to the advanced study of the latest developments in new media and communications, and their effect on traditional media and business models, communications, culture and society.

SNCR will be giving out the awards at its annual Symposium in Cambridge, Massachusetts on Friday, November 14 (right down the street from me). Have a look at the event -- it's well worth a visit to get a look at what's on the leading edge of new communications technologies in business. I'll see you there.