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Much of today's Internet revolves around individual users, the content they create, the communities they form and the transactions they choose. Yet too few companies study how people actually interact with the Web and utilize online collaborative tools, according to a Knowledge@Wharton report. BMW, HP and Ernst & Young, however, were savvy enough to tap the power of social networking. And you can too.
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Republished with permission from Knowledge@Wharton, the online research and business analysis journal of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Mini USA, the American branch of BMW's Mini Cooper line, tracks everything being said about its brand everywhere on line—in blogs, discussion groups, forums, MySpace pages and much more—then uses what it learns to guide advertising campaigns.
At Hewlett-Packard, 50 executives log into their individual blogs each morning to join the ongoing online conversation about each of their product lines, immediately responding to customer problems and concerns.
Ernst & Young recruits many of the 3,500 college graduates it hires every year using a career group on Facebook, where it not only posts job information but also answers individual questions from prospective employees. And Del Monte Pet Foods uses a private online community to regularly "chat" with 400 pet lovers whose opinions help shape new products.
These are all examples of companies savvy enough to participate in the "groundswell," according to Charlene Li, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research. "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."
Li was a speaker at the recent Supernova conference, an annual technology event in San Francisco organized by Wharton legal studies and business ethics professor Kevin Werbach in collaboration with Wharton. Li and Forrester colleague Josh Bernoff have co-authored a book on the subject, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies.
"The more you know and understand the individuals who make up the groundswell around your brand and your company, the more you can use the new social networking phenomenon to your advantage," she said.
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Such understanding comes from going well beyond traditional user surveys, however. According to Li and other speakers at the conference, too few companies study how people actually interact with the web and utilize online collaborative tools, yet much of today's Internet revolves around individual users, the content they create, the communities they form and the transactions they choose.
"People's lives are rich and complex, so you need to get data both in the large and in the small," said Elizabeth Churchill, principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research whose work focuses on user Internet experiences. "That means quantitative data from large groups to answer the 'who, what, where and how' questions, and qualitative data to answer the 'why' questions. For example, we know from research done by [photo sharing website] Flickr that while Americans are big sharers of photos, Scandinavians are not. Why? What is the cultural impact on photo sharing?"
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