A few months ago, after reading a post on the blog History Punk about how academics can develop a personal digital marketing strategy, I asked the blog’s author Jo Hawkins to recommend a book from the marketing world that would also be useful for academics. She recommended a book called Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Digital Technologies written by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff.
As its name suggests, Groundswell is concerned with succeeding in the world of social media. After reading the book on and off for the past several months, I feel that I can confidently give it the following verdict - Groundswell is an informative book that is worth reading, but by no means has to be read in its entirety.
To fall back on a cliché, your mileage may vary with Groundswell. The book has plenty of information and case studies for best practice in social media, if anything it may have too many case studies. Because of this I found that I understood the book’s message long before I actually finished reading it.
Groundswell is divided into three parts: “Understanding the Groundswell,” “Tapping the Groundswell,” and “The Groundswell Transforms.” As you’ve probably noticed by now, the authors use the word ‘groundswell’ a lot in this book, so what is the groundswell? They define 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.”
I really like what they’ve capture with this term. The groundswell is powerful because it is based upon peer-to-peer relationship, disrupting the top-down interactions that characterized 20th century staples like television, newspapers, and marketing. Groundswell threatens these things because it empowers people to take charge of how they consume, create, and share information. Instead of trusting an advertisement’s word that a product is good, people can now turn to each other for recommendations. Bad products have a harder time selling in a world of blogs, Amazon reviews, and twitter.
Groundswell looks at examples of companies and institutions that have succeeded in capitalizing upon the groundswell, and companies that have failed.
While I am confident in recommending the book to anyone interested in learning more about the role social media plays in our society, Groundswell has one major flaw – it was written in 2008. That may have not been very long ago, but in the world of social media, 2008 was a lifetime ago. The e-book version of Groundswell that is available on Amazon is the “updated + enhanced” version of the book, meaning that it was updated in 2011 to include two new chapters, a chapter on twitter strategy and a chapter on the stages of social maturity of organizations. The authors address the age of their book by arguing that since they “[advise] people to focus on the relationships, not the technology … Groundswell has remained relevant.”
For the most part I agree with this sentiment. Groundswell is worth reading because it stresses the social part of social media. Social media success lies in building meaning relationships and interacting with people on a human level – companies that have recognized this are the ones who have succeeded in their social media campaigns. Groundswell does a good job of highlighting examples from a number of different companies and institutions that have made meaning social connections with their publics and explaining why these connections are meaningful.
I’d like to conclude this review by reiterating that your mileage may vary with Groundswell. For someone new to examining social media, I highly recommend this book. For those who have spent some time researching this topic, you might find yourself bored by Groundswell. While the core ideas of the book are strong, they can be grasped quickly, leaving you with case studies that are somewhat out of date and statistics which could be easily, and in many cases more accurately, found through the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
At $8 on Amazon I recommend buying Groundswell and reading as much of it as you need to. There is a lot of food for thought in this book, but for some people it might not be quite enough to make a full meal.
