Book Review: Groundswell

Posted by Sean Lew on Wednesday, 11 February, 2009 under IT strategy, Web 2.0, books, social media |

I bought this book last year shortly after it was released to the public from Book Depository (which is like 1/2 to 1/3 the price of what is sold at the local Borders). I did not have the chance to read this until last week. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. Its an excellent read.

Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. Buy it here.

When I first saw the title, I was thinking – “Excellent word to use to describe social media and Web 2.0 technologies.” Anyway, for those who are new in this space, the authors defined Groundswell as a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other rather than from traditional institutions like corporations.

This book is mainly about how organisations can use the power of social technologies to help organisations achieve their goals. It maps out high level strategies for organisations to folllow and a generic step by step guide to achieving it. This book uses some excellent case studies and uses it well to support their argument. They have leveraged Forrester’s research well and incorporated some good statistics into the book. This is a welcoming change as many results about social media and web 2.0 are still in the form of case studies. Another really nice thing about the book is that it has presented ROI calculations of various technologies a few times and it clearly presented their case extremely well.

This book was focused mainly on Business to Consumer type web 2.0 relationship but it also briefly touched on groundswell within the organisation (internal groundswell).

I would totally recommend this book to anyone who is interested to find out how Web 2.0 can help to communicate, connect and innovate with your customers and how the changing face of corporate marketing.