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.
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