200-The End!!

The last section of Groundswell is about how the groundswell can change your company and how to deal with this change. They give 5 steps to make sure that your company is ready. They say, start small, educate your executives, get the right people to run your strategy, get your agency and technology partners in sync, and plan for the next step and for the long term. Overall the book was pretty boring, it wasn't too bad though and I can use it for my Hewitt Paper. Oh well, its over now.

150-200

Still boring but I'm almost done.  This section is about "Helping the groundswell support itself."  It talks about how the groundswell can support others that are involved in it.  Mainly in the way of customer service.  For example, it uses Dell as an example.  Dell does much of their customer support through a support forum, this cuts way, way down on costs and allows employees to focus on other things.  It can also be much better for the customer since they don't have to go through the whole annoying automated phone thing just to finally get a hold of someone in India.  eBay and Microsoft are another good example of this.  Through my experience, eBay uses customer service chat where you use an instant message system to get help.  This allows one person to talk to a number of customers at once, making them more efficient.  This section is also about "embracing the groundswell."  This talks about how you can use your potential customers in the groundswell to better your company.  For example, it says that a company used a dog enthusiast forum to ask questions about what people's dogs like to eat and about what treats they would buy.  They also talk about things like asking your customers to come up with your new logo.  People are more likely to buy from a company that they has a personal stake in.  I'll finish up the last section tomorrow.  Good thing I had this weekend to catch up on reading.

100-150

How many pages are in this damn book?  Anyway, this section is about energizing the groundswell.  There are a few ways to do this these are: create a rating and review system to get the customer enthused, create a forum for people to discuss your company and its products, and participate in online communities of your brand enthusiasts.  The first one, about the ratings system works best for retail companies where they deal directly with the customers.  The second and third methods work the best for a company whose customers are very enthusiastic about the brand.  For example, Lego found that a bunch of adult fans of Legos had made a site called www.lugnet.com  (Lego Users Group Network) where they all connected and discussed Legos.  In response to this, Lego started what they called Lego Ambassadors so that they would know what is going on in the world of their extreme Lego users.  Some tips that they give to a company who may or may not want to energize the groundswell are:

1. figure out if you want to do so

2. check the social technographics profile of your customers

3. ask yourself, "what is my customer's problem?"

4. pick a strategy that fits your customers and their behaviors the best

5. stick with it.

50-100

I just finished the next 50 pages of Groundswell and it's just as bad as the first 50.  I'm not very into reading in the first place and this book really isn't helping anything.  I don't really know how I can use a book that is written towards a business executive trying to reach out to customers.  It would be great if I was one of these people, but I'm obviously not.

I just read the first 50 pages of Groundswell.  Overall, its not a bad book.  It started out interesting while I was on the bus to MMA.  I read about 25 pages and then fell asleep.  It seems to have gotten more boring and is kind of dry.  It talks mostly about how things in the Groundswell like blogs, RSS feeds, etc. can be used in a business.  It kind of talks to "you," as the business owner and tells how to use it to your business' advantage.  Since I don't own a business, a lot of this turns out to be somewhat irrelevant to me.  Hopefully it gets better in the next 50 pages.

Groundswell

I plan to start reading the book Groundswell when I get it.  I do not have it yet though.  To be honest, I picked this one because it was the shortest one.  I figured that all of them would be about pretty much the same thing.