A 2007 survey suggested that 96 percent of American teenagers visit an online social network at least once a week while another suggested that easily more than half of marketing, corporate communications, and public relations practitioners regularly participate in social networks.

Such is the Web 2.0 world, as suggested by Efthymios Constantinides and Stefan J. Fountain who wrote the following recently in the Journal of Direct, Data, and Digital Marketing Practice:

“The shift in customer needs is reflected in the growing demand for online services, particularly in the Web 2.0 domain, where consumers can not only interact with marketers but also access peer communities. The fast expansion of the ‘blogsphere’ and other online platforms where people can post and exchange personal ideas, videos, pictures and tags but also participate in virtual worlds or games has by now created its own dynamics: it occurs without any form of marketing effort from the part of the application providers. The value attributed to these applications is not based on the classic customer value approach but
rather on some feeling of achievement through personal gratification.”

Simply, the online tools that define Web 2.0 are being used to carry out a marketing revolution where practitioners and researchers are just beginning to categorize the effects along with the values and benefits of a phenomenon in which marketing power is migrating in large proportions from organizations to consumers. Less about new technology and more about applications, the revolution has been started upon the capacity of individuals to create and edit content in unprecedented ways.

A good place to start making sense of this extraordinary situation is to read “Groundswell: winning in a world transformed by social technologies,” a just-released book by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research. Writing in less than 250 pages, the authors have produced an entertaining quick read, packed with relevant cases, useful background information, and strategic suggestions. Think of it as the first draft of the history of Web 2.0. In fact, the authors used wiki as a tool to assist in the book’s writing.

There are two aspects of this book which, I believe, particularly make it an important contribution to the phenomenon of multi-platform marketing (a term wisely suggested by B. L. Ochman, Internet marketing expert who’s based in New York City). First, is the term “groundswell.” The definition, which follows, reflects roots of how people connected long before there were blogs, wikis, Twitter, online communities, and virtual worlds. The groundswell is:

“A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations.”

The term and the definition signal that what we’re seeing — perhaps much to the dismay of traditional mass marketers and old-line advertising and public relations agencies — is not a passing trend. This is a transformational realignment that will necessitate a new generation of marketing communications manuals and texts for business students, business owners, and corporate communication practitioners.

Second is the social technographics profile, a tool thoroughly described in the book’s third chapter of 23 pages and subsequently applied in the book’s numerous case examples. Instead of focusing on demographic and psychographics attributes, Li and Bernoff have hypothesized a ladder diagram which helps classify people according to their technology use behaviors in six groups (creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, and inactives).

It certainly is a good starting point to assess the extent of social media activity in which a particular company’s customer base would be engaged. In fact, the authors have established a companion blog — groundswell.forrester.com – for the book, which includes a free profile tool along with an effective PowerPoint introduction to the concepts behind the social technographics profile.

“Groundswell,” indeed, is a broadly enthusiastic perspective on the transformative potential of customer advocacy. One of my favorite lines concerning the ramifications of a groundswell approach is “the no-more-being-stupid factor.” The authors mince no words here:

“Listening to the groundswell will relentlessly reveal your stupidity. When customers can complain, bitterly and accurately, about the way you do business and you can measure and quantify their complaints, it’s hard to deny your own flaws. The constituency for stupid policies and products will evaporate in the face of highly visible customer feedback.”

As a public relations professional, I endorse this statement unconditionally. No doubt, surveys from a fairly diverse range of sources suggest that consumers are consistently and persistently skeptical about mainstream media content and traditional marketing practices predicated on the old interruption-disruption model of advertising. There are plenty of scholars, business leaders, and marketing communications professionals who champion the current generation of consumer empowerment, adding that the avenues for individual creativity and influence outweight concerns about lack of control and ambiguities of accountability. Meanwhile, Andrew Keen’s polemic from 2007 — “The Cult of the Amateur: how today’s Internet is killing our culture” — warned of the increasing difficulty to distinguish between verifiable quality and utter nonsense.

A Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has written extensively about the impact of digital technology, Keen believes the self-broadcasting, self-publishing enterprise that has flourished in digital media channels has created a dangerous blur between the trained, well-informed expert/author and the uninformed amateur who hardly hesitates to “cut and paste” online content without obtaining permission to reproduce it. Keen draws a bead on the “ubiquitous remix” and “intellectual kleptomaniacs” which have confounded our ability to verify original authorship and authentic ownership of content.

Albeit Keen’s words were aggressively polemical, Li and Bernoff show little, if any concern, about this. In fact, the onus of deception seems to rest upon the organization:

“In this world of constant feedback, one element of some corporate culture is definitely going away. Strategies based on deception are doomed to failure. If your high-speed Internet offering is slower in real life than your competitors’, skeptics will point a finger at the stream of online review and discussion groups, and people will know. If your new mop looks great and costs less but the refills are expensive, people will know. If your mortgage company underestimates how long the paperwork takes, people will know.”

Fair enough. Perhaps the authors, sensitive to educating a business audience quite unsure of what Web 2.0 means, prudently skirted these concerns in this early going, hoping not to give weight to possible excuses avoiding the need to pay attention to the groundswell. Therefore, at this stage, it would make more sense to visualize this phenomenon not as a widescale threat but as a challenge which must be studied, researched, and assessed for its impact upon marketing and communications strategies.

And, Li and Bernoff have done important work here, particularly in presenting a diverse array of case examples where companies have engaged dialogue, openness, and one-to-one interactions and have done so successfully especially after initial awkward missteps. In particular, the authors emphasize that mistakes will be made, especially when one is dealing with the uncontrollable — and sometimes unpredictable — elements of Web 2.0 tools.

I also like Groundswell for what it suggests in terms of practical research efforts. The social technographics profile tool is good for identifying and classifying the tools of the social media revolution from the parallels of technological and commercial perspectives. This will be useful for longitudinal analyses that seek to gauge the systematic impact of the Web 2.0 phenomenon. It also provides a useful foundation for analyzing and dissecting the strengths and weaknesses, as well as the opportunities and threats, of niche marketing strategies. And, finally, the impetus is there to formally bury the old marketing mix models and bring forward models in which brand equity as well as customer recruitment and retention take their appropriate place in the strategic planning process.