Book Review: Groundswell

It’s been a few months since I received my review copy of “Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies” and this review is LONG overdue.

Groundswell is co-authored by Forrester VPs/analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff (Li has recently left Forrester) and focuses on strategic direction for companies looking to take part in the “groundswell” of social media to further their business goals.

Quite simply, I LOVE this book. In my role as strategist at a digital agency, I’ve already found a number of opportunities to refer to the cases contained in Groundswell, as well as the “Technographics” overlay of demographic data and online social activities.

Here are a few things I feel Groundswell has going for it over many other social media strategy books:

• Clear methodology: Li and Bernoff outline what they call the POST approach to social media (evaluate your People, determine your Objectives, create your Strategy & select your Technology,) which I feel has tremendous value far beyond social media projects.
• Actionable analytic analysis: The aforementioned Technographics data uses Forrester research to show how different groups are more or less likely to take part in particular social media activities. For example, young American males are more likely to create and upload media such as photos or videos than are middle aged American women. While many of us who work in new media might find this kind of insight obvious, it’s incredibly useful to have actual data to back up our hunches when we are going to clients to pitch an idea.
• Well-organized and relevant cases: That case studies make up the bulk of the pages of Groundswell is neither surprising nor original for a social media strategy book, but what I found helpful were the indexes of these cases. Anyone who has dealt with a clients knows that it’s great to be able to quickly pull out a case study in their industry or country when they start on their “well, that might work for X but it will never work here” speech.

My only real beef with Groundswell is that, despite the fact there are a couple of very good Canadian case studies, there is no Canadian Technographics data. However the folks from Forrester (including Josh Bernoff) explained in answer to my question on their forum that the Canadian data had been omitted due to their publishing schedule, and would be added to the online Technographics tool as soon as it becomes available. Great to see Bernoff and his colleagues are practicing what they preach when it comes to listening and responding to customers.

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