Lately I’ve been reading an excellent book by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff entitled Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. I’ll use this blog to record and discuss some of the book’s interesting ideas.
What is the groundswell?
The authors define the groundswell as “a spontaneous movement of people using online tools to connect, take charge of their own experience, and get what they need — information, support, ideas, products, and bargaining power — from each other…. Simply put, the groundswell is a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other instead of from companies” (X).
That’s a mind-bender. I work for a company that cares very much about their image and branding. Those in our organization who control traditional publications processes feel that our publications have to be perfect before they go to print, which means we often get stalled. We don’t cover enough domains or enough languages for our customers, nor do we update information fast enough to keep it relevant. What Li and Bernoff teach us in this book is that Web 2.0 — the phenomenon that powers the Groundswell — is happening to our market whether we want it or not, and that if we don’t find ways to harness the power of communities in creating valued content, the community will do it themselves and make us, as professionals, irrelevant.
Li and Bernoff mention that the groundswell phenomenon is “based on people acting on their eternal desire to connect” (X). This desire, it seems to me, is so powerful that it can drive a community of volunteers to quickly outpace any group of professional writers. If your company expects, as ours does, to create a community wiki where corporate professionals will influence the content site-wide to make it more instructive, the company’s writers had better learn to overcome their urge to write stuff themselves and instead learn to become enablers and coordinators of community writing teams.
Web 2.0, Community & Virtual Reference 