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Mini USA, the American branch of BMW's Mini Cooper line, tracks everything said about its brand - in blogs, discussion groups, forums, MySpace pages and much more - and then uses what it learns to guide advertising campaigns.
At Hewlett-Packard, 50 executives log into their individual blogs each morning to join the ongoing online conversation about each of their product lines, immediately responding to customer problems and concerns.
Ernst & Young recruits many of the 3,500 university graduates it hires every year through a career group on Facebook, where it not only posts job information but also answers individual questions from prospective employees.
And, Del Monte Pet Foods uses a private online community to regularly "chat" with 400 pet lovers whose opinions help shape new products.
These are all examples of companies which are sophisticated to a point that they participate in the "groundswell," according to Charlene Li, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research. "The groundswell is a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations."
Li spoke at a recent Supernova conference, an annual technology event in San Francisco organized by Wharton legal studies and business ethics professor Kevin Werbach in collaboration with Wharton. Li and Forrester colleague Josh Bernoff have co-authored a book on the subject - Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies.
"The more you know and understand the individuals who make up the groundswell around your brand and your company, the more you can use the new social networking phenomenon to your advantage," she said.
Such understanding comes from going well beyond traditional user surveys, however. According to Li and other speakers at the conference, too few companies study how people actually interact with the web and utilize online collaborative tools, yet much of today's Internet revolves around individual users, the content they create, the communities they form, and the transactions they choose.
"People's lives are rich and complex, so you need to get data both in the large and in the small," says Elizabeth Churchill, principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research whose work focuses on user Internet experiences. "That means quantitative data from large groups to answer the 'who, what, where and how' questions, and qualitative data to answer the 'why' questions. For example, we know from research done by Flickr that while Americans are big sharers of photos, Scandinavians are not. Why? What is the cultural impact on photo sharing?"
Looking more carefully at people's behavior on the Internet can uncover surprises, sometimes calling into question basic assumptions - for instance, that most young people are adept at using the Internet. Conference presenter Eszter Hargittai, Northwestern University professor of sociology and communication studies, studied a diverse group of students attending the University of Illinois at Chicago and found that 43% failed on a search task, based largely on their misunderstanding of Internet terminology and on their inability to navigate links.
Li agrees, citing Forrester research on the range of behavior on the web, which is sometimes based on skill and demographics, while at other times linked more to a user's stage of life. So-called Alpha Moms "are comfortable with technology, interested in parenting, and have above-average incomes," says Li, "but they have no time. So if you're trying to reach them, you don't give them blogs. You give them communities of their peers with opportunities for feedback."
To help companies target their Internet strategies, Li and Bernoff have organized Forrester research into a "social technology ladder," which classifies consumers based on their participation in various types of social networking.
- at the lowest rung of the ladder are the "inactives," some 44% of all US American adults who were online in 2007.
- higher up are the "joiners," the 25% who visit social networking sites like MySpace.
- collectors, an elite 15% who collect and aggregate information.
- critics, those who post ratings and reviews as well as contribute to blogs and forums.
Only 18% of all online Americans actually create content, publishing an article or a blog at least once a month, maintaining a web page or uploading content to sites like YouTube.
The power of such a classification lies in giving organizations a clear understanding of how consumers are behaving online, reports Li. "Any successful strategy to tap into the groundswell has to begin with assessing customers' social activities. Then you can decide what you want to accomplish, plan for how your relationship with your customers will change, and finally decide what social technology to use."
Li is currently investigating why people move up and down this ladder of social technologies, and what are the levers companies can use to encourage consumers to act. It is critical for organizations to hone their understanding of groundswell activities, observes Li, because "in five to 10 years, social networks will be everywhere."
(excerpt of "Not a Site, but a Concept: Tapping the Power of Social Networking," Knowledge@ Wharton, July 9-22, 2008. Copyright 2008 Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.)
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