Jon DiPietro is Domesticating IT

“Groundswell” by Forrester Research analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoffis one of the earliest and most influential books on the business effects and uses of social media.  It is often at the top of recommended reading lists, and for good reason.  The book is very well written, informative, practical, actionable and soaked with real stories and examples.  I recommend the book to anyone involved or interested in how social media affects organizations and the ways in which they can leverage it.

But there’s one large caveat; Li and Bernoff (unsurprisingly) take every possible opportunity to inject research analysts into each step of the process.

The Skinny

Why it rocks:

The book brilliantly paints a picture of your organization before, during, and after engagement in social media.  It lays out the influences it is having on all businesses, provides clear and understandable (i.e. non-techy) strategies and tactics for implementing it, and then predicts the aftermath of embracing social media.

Why It Doesn’t:

At every opportunity, the analyst-authors espouse the importance of using analysts to properly align your strategy with the social demographics of your target audience.  On its face, it sounds perfectly logical and back in 2008 (yeah, way back then) it was probably much more important than it is today.  One reason is that the ROI calculation was much more delicate two years ago than it is today, as the investment was generally higher and the return significantly lower.  In other words, it is arguably much easier to earn a positive ROI on social media engagement today.  Also, given the ubiquity of social networking sites and the advent of real time search, there are lots of fringe benefits to social media engagement that, in many cases, can make the ROI case themselves.  Finally, more and more customers expect their vendors to be present in social media.  This means that not participating can become both an opportunity cost and have a negative impact on their brand, both of which are hard to quantify.

Who Will Dig It:

Managers and executives who are ignorant, dubious, curious, or all of the above with regard to the hows and whys of engaging their organizations in social media will find the book very valuable and a fairly easy read.

The Essence

Part one focuses on understanding the groundswell.  This first section by itself would make the book worth reading!  It provides solid background and compelling examples to underscore the concepts.  But it also introduces the core idea of the Social Technographic Profile.  While I think this is a valuable thought exercise, I feel that the concept is a bit overdone.  The idea is that you should tune your social media presence according to the technographical makeup of your target audience.  My thoughts are that there are now sufficient tools available that the cost of leveraging all of the channels makes it a no-brainer to do so regardless of your target audience.

Part two of “Groundswell” builds on the concept of the social technographics profile and describes strategies and tactics for tapping into the groundswell.  With chapters on listening to, talking with, energizing, and helping the groundswell, no stone is left unturned.  Once again, my only beef is that the importance of determining the social technographic profile and shaping your strategy around it is slightly overemphasized.  I would argue that similar to writing a business plan, the journey is more important than the destination.

Finally, part three talks about the transformation that an organization fully engaged in social media will undergo.  These are important considerations, because like many initiatives, an organization cannot simply go through the motions.  Doing so will be painfully obvious to the social media world and will cause more harm than good.

The Verdict

Though I found the self-promotion of the analysts to be a bit strong and notwithstanding the fact that some of the concepts are becoming slightly dated, the book has too much valuable information not to recommend it.  And I do recommend it strongly with my previously expressed caveats.  So, as they say at the end of the book, I “look forward to meeting you in the groundswell.”

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I’m going to make the case that you can’t afford not to gamble.

Let’s start with some not so simple statistics (I promise this won’t hurt).  Let’s assume we’re playing a game that has 1% chance to win $1,500 and costs $10 to play.  If your budget is $1,000 your chances to win at least once are 73% (sorry, it’s not as simple as 100/100).  Those aren’t great risk/reward options – $365 of upside versus $270 of downside.  But what happens if the cost of the game drops to $1?  Then your odds of winning at least once are 99.9%, so you’re looking at $499 of upside and $1 of downside.  Now let’s add a another wrinkle to this story.  What if I told that if you there was a better than 50% chance you’d lose your $1,000 even if you didn’t play?

Another way to look at this would be to compare the cost of 99.9% success rate.  In the three scenarios above, those costs are $10,000, $1,000, and $10 respectively.  How much of a no-brainer is it to spend $10 with a 99% probability of winning $1,500?

Cost of Failure

The first point I’m driving at here is that as the cost of failure approaches zero and the reward stays constant, at some point it ceases to be gambling and becomes something that simply can’t lose.  I’m writing about this today because I’m reading the book Groundswell and this concept has been bugging me throughout the book.  Since the authors are market researchers, I suppose it’s no surprise that they constantly harp on the need to carefully segment your target social media market (something they call “technographics“) and properly target your strategy accordingly.  They would have you determine, for example, whether your audience is composed predominately of “critics,” “creators,” “joiners,” or various other categories.  Once you’ve determined this, you can then proceed with deciding the best social media strategy and tools to employ.

The only problem with this approach is that it assumes a high cost of failure, which is not necessarily the case with the wide variety of low and no cost platforms available in our Web 2.0 economy.  Having said that, the book went a long way toward redeeming itself near the very end by encouraging companies not focus on the possibility of failure, but the cost of missed opportunities.  ”To do this, companies need to be ready to fail often, fail quickly, and most importantly, fail cheaply.”

Cost of Not Winning

If that argument is not compelling enough, then consider the final wrinkle to my original allegory.  Why not just play it safe?  If you never try, you never win, but you also never lose.  Right?  That’s true as long as your competitors and/or market don’t change the rules of the game on you.  There is a risk to not adapting or innovating that frequently inflicts more damaging, if not lethal consequences.

You need to consider the cost of failure before dismissing particular approaches or needlessly investing in research that, at the end of the day, may cost more than failing.  And just as importantly, consider the potential cost of doing nothing at all.

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