Still in Barcelona... Josh Bernoff, the Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research was speaking on the subject of "The Groundswell of Social Computing", subject taken from his book titled "Groundswell - Winning in a world transformed by new technologies".
How does he define the word "Groundswell" ? It's a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations.
Josh goes on by describing the 4-step approach to the groundswell :
People - Assess your customer's social activities
Objectives - Decide what you want to accomplish
Strategy - Plan for how relationships with customers will change
Technology - Decide which social technologies to use
Once again the highlight is on the strategy and not the technology ! Don't set up a blog just because it's trendy and because other companies have a blog. Set up a blog if you feel this is part of the strategy you set up for your company (get customers' feedback for example).
Josh went on explaining how you could use new technologies with your customers for different purposes: to listen to them (Research), to talk to them (Marketing), or even to "energize" them (Sales) and gave a few concrete examples of brands who successfully managed to do so.
Althought I had already heard about it, I really like the strategy that the wine company Stormhoek set up to differentiate themselves within this very competitive wine business and how they managed to develop their brand image, identity and grap customers' attention through a "web 2.0 strategy". They found 150 top bloggers in the UK and Ireland, sent them all a bottle of their wine ; 600 posts later they sponsored "geek diners", hooked up with the famous blogger / cartoonist Hugh "Gapinvoid" who is now the official voice of Stormhoek wine. Oh, and of course they have a Facebook Group, a Flickr Group, etc, etc...
Clever isn't it ? Well, as mentioned in the previous post, the age of telling and selling is dead... Welcome the influence marketing !
Credit photo : Scott Beale (Laughing Squid)
