Josh Bernoff, Senior Vice President of Idea Development at Forrester Research, writes regularly for the “Wall Street Journal” and the “New York Times”. The USA -based Society for New Communications Research (SNCR ) named Bernoff and Charlene Li Visionaries of the Year in 2008.
Josh Bernoff and co-author Charlene Li publi- shed “Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies” in 2008 (Harvard Business Press). It was released in Germany in 2009 as “Facebook, YouTube, Xing & Co.” (Hanser) and became one of Amazon’s top ten business publica- tions that year. The duo’s next book, “Empowered”, due out this fall, explores the management challenges that come from empowering employees to engage in the groundswell.
Why European companies must participate in the groundswell
Since our book “Groundswell” appeared in 2008, I’ve gone all over the world to talk to companies about their customers’ use of social technologies and applications like blogs, Twitter, YouTube, and Xing, in which people connect with and draw strength from each other. These environments intrigue companies; they have a lot of potential, but an environment where customers are in control can be terrifying for traditional marketers. Here’s why you should put your doubts aside and participate: your customers are there.
As of mid-2009, more than half of online Europeans were consuming social content of some kind. One in seven Europeans were creating social content on blogs, uploading to YouTube, or contributing in a similar way. Three out of ten are in social networks like Facebook. The numbers are slightly lower in Germany, with 38 percent of online Germans consuming social content. Levels of social participation have been rising for the last three years, with Asia moving a little faster and Europe a little slower, but the trend is clear – social is on its way to near-universal acceptance.
Do business buyers use these channels? Actually, they are even more likely to participate. Ninety-six percent of the business decision-makers we survey consume social content, and 75 percent say they do so for their jobs.
Based on this level of participation, we’ve seen some amazing business-to-business applications. For example, National Instruments, a company that makes technology for monitoring and controlling devices, starts and ends its marketing with its online community. Its community now has 110,000 members, mostly engineers, who answer each others’ questions, and contribute articles on how to use the company’s products in sophisticated and innovative ways. National Instruments takes its cues for everything, from new product features to marketing, from its own customers.
Or consider Sonic Foundry, a company that delivers corporate Webcasts. The company holds its annual user conference in Madison, Wisconsin, far from the major population centers in the U.S. In this era of declining travel budgets, Sonic Foundry attracted more customers with online video and social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter to draw people into the content they were planning. At the event itself, they reached out to both attendees and those who weren’t present with on-site video interviews of customers interviewing each other, posts featuring more video, and a live Webcast of the sessions, all promoted by social media. Result: a 15 percent increase in paying conference attendees, and a five-fold increase in the fans for the company’s Facebook page.
I see these efforts succeed all the time. And I also see them fail. The most common reason for failure is a lack of discipline in approaching this new way of communicating. No one would implement a new accounting system because they thought it was “cool,” and yet corporate marketers often take this approach to social applications. The results, as with any “dive in now, ask questions later” effort, tends to be poor. Instead of plunging forward based on what’s fashionable, we recommend a disciplined four-step approach to social applications, using the acronym POST (for People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology).
