Groundswell

Your customers rate your products on forums, discuss these evaluations and build your online reputation – completely outside your direct influence. Ignoring this fundamental groundswell is dangerous. Seeking to control it is illusory. Based on this observation, the authors, both analysts at Forrester, explain how companies can nonetheless turn this situation to their advantage by learning to capitalize on the phenomenon of social networks. Based on a solid analysis of online behaviors and a great deal of feedback from leading companies, this book reveals the basic premises of a judicious approach to these communities. In particular, the authors focus in chapter 4 on the importance of precisely defining the benefits to the business expected from this type of approach and verifying the online behavior of customers before getting started. This book also deserves a read for the way it structures feedback on a diverse range of experiences and for pointing out tools such as the one used to define the “technographic” profiles of internet users.