The "social web" enables smart companies to engage in conversations at any scale with their customers, from product support to "ideation" that leads to new products, features and more efficient operations. Companies ignore the reality of social computing at their peril; new and evolving web technologies make it increasingly easy for sufficiently-motivated customers to spontaneously generate and maintain communities around a company's products and services in order to offer mutual support, accolades, but also to air grievances they feel those companies are ignoring.
Smart, proactive companies understand that committing themselves to maintaining healthy community-based relationship with their customers is not only the right thing to do, but is essential in this age of the digital native.
Forrester Research analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff discussed this reality in their 2008 book groundswell: winning in a world transformed by social technologies, the culmination of their research since 2006 on role that social computing plays in the enterprise. groundswell (Harvard Business Press) contains many rich case studies illustrating how companies have successfully applied social web strategies to foster communities internally and especially with their customers.
One thing that impresses me about groundswell is that it recognizes that companies must have a wide variety of "critical conversations" (to paraphrase Peter Block) with their customers, and that there is an equally diverse palette of technologies for implementing these conversations. Here is a sample of the social technologies --- Li and Bernoff call them "strategies" --- that they examine in detail:
Ambassador programs; Blogs; Brand monitoring; Community (ideas); Community (private); Community (public); Crowd-sourcing; Discussion forums; Q & A; Ratings and reviews; Social networking sites; User-generated videos; Voting; Wikis; Widgets;
This is a great book targeted at decision makers who need to understand the rich set of relationships they must establish with their customers, and how to apply social computing tools to maintain those relationships.
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