I read very slowly, when there's something I like to read, and since late March I've been reading, on and off, Groundswell, by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff (I met Charlene and got a signed advance reader's copy in late March, BTW - it's all chewed up by now) is a seminal book that will probably change social media and push it into a new direction.

I'm going to distill what I got our of Groundswell in this post and the one that follows it.

I came to understand the reason certain social network technologies (such as Facebook) succeed is they fulfill a common need of a target audience(s) (page 23). I also notice many of the charts in Groundswell could be useful to Web Analysts (table 2-3 on page 27) as a way to gauge the use of social media on a website against a standard.  For example, if we know that 11% of online consumers using forums, ratings and reviews in the United States post to a particular blog - we can look at the analytics of that blog (site) and determine if more/less than 11% of the weekly or monthly visitors also posted a comment - if more did, we can say the blog has more engagement than average, if less, than less enragement than average.

The Social Technographics ladder (figure 3-2) on page 43 is a useful construct, a way to reach a group by figuring out what social media strategies might work for that group based on it's composition; the strength of this approach is it's based on demographics, but it is also it's weakness - the model is not behavioral (but still, it's a good way to start building a social media strategy).

Also, while Groundswell is a well researched and well written book, it often falls into showing differences between groups, such as those based on the Social Technographics Profiles of Asian and European countries (table 3-1 on page 50) without attempting to explain why those differences exist in the first place.  In that sense, the authors don't fully satisfy my curiosity.

Yet, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff are wise, they know, as I know, that poor technology can doom almost any project (page 74) and council we deploy projects that can be done quickly and easily (ugh - that means most large scale Web Analytics deployments are doomed to fail, because they are too complex and take too long to deploy - and honestly, how many deployments do you know about where stakeholders are happy with what they ended up getting?  Not that many).

Another area the authors are really smart about it saying your brand is what your customers say it is (page 78); try telling that to top heavy corporations (I won't name them, but they're all around you) that still think they own their own brands (what foolishness!).  I also got to learn about growing or setting up your own private communities (page 82-83) such as what Communispace does for a hefty fee - which makes sense for companies that can afford to do this.

My only problem, or question about setting up private communities, is they're kind like genetic engineered test tube communities - they're useful - but as they were "constructed" there may be some bias introduced that sets limits to the full usefulness of such a community.   I don't say it's wrong, or right - just problematic to seed communities this way - but it's also true the backend tools to analyze social network activity are build into Communispace's platforms where they are next to non-existent in other social network platforms, like Ning, Kickapps and perhaps, even Facebook.

And while I was attending the Social Media Roundtable in Toronto this week (see Social Media Roundtable - Part 1, Linking social media campaigns to sales of products - Social Media Roundtable - part 2, Next Level Engagement - Social Media Roundtable - Part 3) we were asked about successful implementations of a Social Media Campaign and the authors have given us one on page 92 with the detailed relationship between buzz and sales using the "online promoter score" an indicator of how much online chatter will likely lead to a recommendation to buy or try a product or service.

In the next post, I'll finish up my review of Groundswell - Groundswell - by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff - review - part 2.