Reading response #3: The “future” is here

Although the third part of the Groundswell: The Groundswell Transforms is the shortest part of the book it’s also the one that resonated the most with me. While the previous two parts focused more on the concepts behind the notion of the Groundswell - blogs, RSS, social media marketing etc. – and how they can change the interactions between the company and its customers the last part talked about how the company itself can change by embracing the power of Groundswell in its internal interactions. 

One of the main reasons why I think this concept resonated with me so much is because I believe that the company I work for would benefit greatly from doing a better job engaging the very concepts we preach to our clients internally. Without a doubt Compete actively engages with its customers and the broader audience through blogs/webinars etc. which usually receive plenty of comments and attention. Granted Compete as a company deals mostly with large corporate clients providing them with complex professional research and solutions worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, so the extent of its engagement in the groundswell is somewhat limited by the very nature of its business.

Figure 1: Compete Pulse: Compete’s Newsletter & blog

 

However, I firmly believe that internally Compete could <but doesn’t> benefit greatly for harnessing the collective power and knowledge of its employees. For instance there’s little structure to share the expertise, projects or initiatives between different parts of the company. Essentially each industry vertical (e.g. Financial Services, Travel, Technology/Entertainment) functions like its own little company within a company, creating a somewhat fragmented and syloed culture. Not only does it potentially have a negative impact on morale but it also means that frequently we have to reinvent the wheel over and over again in cases when someone who works for another vertical has already solved (or is solving) a similar problem: not a very productive approach. Building on Li and Bernoff’s demonstrated benefits of internal tools like blogs, wikis and even social networks I believe Compete could use a similar approach to help create a much more open and collaborative environment which in turn makes the organization more efficient, agile and stronger in the face of change. While this might be a good or even a great idea for the company, it also resonated with me that in order for harnessing the power of the groundswell within the company to succeed the top echelons of the organization (i.e. the management team) need to be vested in the approach… something that I intent to work on in the near future.

Now back to the actual reading responseJ. In the last chapter of the book the authors give a hypothetical account of how Groundswell may look like in 2012 (i.e. 4 years after the book was published). Their account of “the future” looks like this: “Your phone is also telling you that the Federal Trade Commission is thinking of blocking your top two competitors from merging with each other […] because you’ve set the device up to bring you information from the Wall Street Journal, Footwear News, and Women’s Daily. The feeds are smart – they watch what you’ve been reading and bring you more of the stuff they know you, and others similar to you, would like to know. Downing the last of your morning coffee, you receive an alert that warns the interstate is backed up again […]. You make sure your phone’s GPS tracking system is on so that you can add your own commute progress to the traffic database”. Well, I think it’s safe to say that the authors were off by about 2 years in their assessment of how long it would take for that future to come, because it is already here! Literally everything the authors described is happening today from the “smart” news feeds to, GPS phone alerts, to harnessing the power of the collective to gather the data on anything and everything from traffic to the political sentiment. However, in the ever-changing world of the groundswell this is hardly surprising; as Li and Bernoff put it “the technology moves fast” and from the look of it the Groundswell is going increasingly more mobile, and having the world in your pocket starts to gain quite a literal meaning.

Reading response #2: Groundswell is great but as Nestle found out it can turn against you…on your own turf

If part one of Li and Bernoff’s book focused on helping readers figure out what the Groundswell *is*, the second part deals with a much more complicated issue: what the hell to do with it. In my opinion this presents a much more poignant and difficult decision for the company. The internet and the social media phenomenon have been around for a while now so even those CEOs of big corporations siloed in their corner offices know (to greater or lesser extent) that groundswell exists; what they don’t know is how to deal with it. And dealing with it is scary; not only because groundswell is big, powerful, unpredictable and ever-changing but also because it forces companies to think long and hard about who they really are, what values they stand for, what their collective image is, and <scariest of all> how much influence does the “ivory tower” (i.e. the corner office and the board of directors meeting room) really have over that image. And in almost all cases, as Li and Bernoff point out, engaging with the Groundswell would mean that the company will have to change.

In my opinion one of the most important points of the second part of the book is that interactions with the groundswell will be different for different companies. I think one of the key mistakes that many companies have made in the past and continue to make is assuming that what worked for Company A will work for them as well, which is simply not the case. As the book points out how you should interact with the Groundswell will greatly depend on what product(s) you sell, who your customers are, what you company stands for and last but not least how willing are you to listen and embrace what it has to say about you <I really liked the analogy the authors draw between traditional marketing being more like shouting at consumers and social media marketing being more like having a conversation with them>. Further on, as the authors point out, simply creating a fan page or a forum does not mean that you are engaging with the Groundswell (not in any kind of a positive or constructive manner at least). Tapping the groundswell has to, at the very minimum, include listening to and talking with it (even better if you manage to energize your online community and help it support itself). The problem? Be prepared to potentially hear some unpleasant things.

Nestle was one of the companies that learned the hard way how the formidable power of the Groundswell can turn against you.

Here’s what happened:

To start of Nestle’s involvement in the groundswell has not been particularly great to begin with. They did maintain a Facebook homepage and a forum but it seems like the real reason behind having it was “because everyone else has one”, so it wasn’t useful or insightful and most certainly didn’t do much to engage the online community. But by having a public forum <however badly managed> did open Nestle to the power of the groundswell… with some unexpected results. Greenpeace, a powerful environmental group, had a standing issue with Nestle – use of the palm oil, which they claimed deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions and endangered species loss. Unlike Nestle Greenpeace already had a strong Groundswell community united by their passion for preserving planet Earth; further, once again, unlike Nestle, Greenpeace has long been using the “power of the online collective” to promote their ideas. In this particular case their posted a highly controversial video that highlighted their concerns about Nestle’s usage of palm oil on YouTube

Nestle reacted to the video in a typical corporate way – lobbied to remove the video sighting copyright infringement as the reason. It helps to add that as soon as they did that the video caught on like a wildfire and went viral though multiple reposts by other YouTube users, bloggers etc.  Cue, the first mistake: Nestle refused to listen to what their customers were saying about their products and corporate practices. As Li and Bernoff point out “your brand is what your customers say it is and in the groundswell where they communicate with each other, they decide” (page 78). All of a sudden Nestle’s brand was not about coffee and mid-afternoon chocolate snacks, it was about dead orangutans.

But it didn’t end there; in fact, things went from bad to worse. Greenpeace, who, in contrast to Nestle, was very much in-touch with its online community, encouraged its supporters to change their Facebook profile photos to anti-Nestle slogans that incorporated easily-recognizable company's food logos (see Figure 1) and start posting to the Nestle fan page en masse. 

Figure 1: Examples of anti-Nestle Facebook profile pictures

 

Granted, this was a very unpleasant spot for Nestle. But as we all know from the book things don’t always go as planned when Groundswell is concerned, yet companies managed to make lemonade from the lemons that Groundswell threw at them (Dell’s flaming laptop story was a great example of that), unfortunately Nestle was not one of them. Cue, the second mistake: they refused to talk with the Groundswell. Not only that, they tried to use the social networking media to “shout” at their consumers and impose their rules on the online community. Following several posts from Facebook users using altered Nestle logos as their profile pictures Nestle’s PR rep threatened to start removing comments from those users. That really pushed things over the edge; now Nestle was seen not only as the orangutan killer but also as a company that stifles criticism from their customers, something the Groundswell doesn’t look upon kindly.

Figure 2: Nestle’s Facebook “fan” page several hours after Nestle’s PR rep threatened to remove comments from people who use altered version of any of the company’s logos 

In the end the Nestle apologized for their reaction and stopped deleting comments but the damage was done.

So to sum up, Nestle is a cautionary tale for all those that underestimate the power of the Groundswell. Nestle clearly didn’t have a strategy around how to engage in social media marketing; they had no plan around how to effectively listen to or talk with the Groundswell (forget energizing it, helping it support itself or embracing it). This is really a shame because for a company like Nestle the Groundswell could be an incredibly powerful (and positive) resource for everything from new product development (as was the case with Loblaw and Del Monte, Li and Bernoff, page 179,191) to creating communities around its brand (Nesquick, anyone) to even turning its customers into brand ambassadors based on already shared interests (e.g. baking enthusiasts for its TOLL HOUSE brand). However, for now one thing is clear, they need a new PR person.