GroundswellWinning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies

A groundswell is sweeping through your customers. Right now, they are writing about your products on blogs and recutting your commercials on YouTube. They're defining you on Wikipedia and ganging up on you in social-networking sites like Facebook. These are all elements of a social phenomenon – the groundswell – that has created a permanent shift in the way the world works. Most companies see it as a threat. It's time to see it an opportunity. In Groundswell, two of Forrester Research's top analysts tell listeners how to turn the force of customers connecting to their own advantage. With 25 vivid cases from around the world – from health care to retail to consumer goods to business services – Li and Bernoff show how leading companies are gaining insights, generating revenue, saving money, and energizing their own customers. Whether listeners are in marketing, research, support, sales, development, or even running the whole enterprise, there's targeted advice here for them, backed up with real-world ROI to prove it works. Groundswell is based on hard consumer data and experience with dozens of companies. The listener will hear how the marketers of Procter & Gamble proved that subtle marketing within a community was four times as effective as television…how Best Buy taps into the intelligence of over a thousand of its employees with its own social network…how Dell has transformed itself by embracing customer insights in nearly every department…and how a South African winery boosted its sales tenfold by tapping into the power of bloggers, YouTube, Facebook, and every other tool in the social technology arsenal. This trend cannot be ignored. Listeners must learn how to ride the wave. There's no going back.