Book Review: The Groundswell- everything is about social networking today

My inspiration for this blog rant comes from a book "Groundswell" by charlene li and josh bernoff from forrester research.


Are you doing these things?
- looking it up on a wiki (www.wikipedia.com)
- tag it with del.icio.us (http://delicious.com/)
- find a widget that will do it
- will you Digg this (www.digg.com)
- can you friend me
- let's mash these up on one page

This is the groundswell! And you say, so, what is it? Some of us are in the know, others are not, some are up and comers, some are out of touch. Some think of this as an opportunity, others think of it as an annoyance.

What it really is is a force that can be harnessed like a skill set. But to harness it effectively, you will need the proper level of knowledge and experience to understand it and how to use it to your advantage. The use of social technologies can be analogous to the Big Bang of the Internet. Scientists know that the Big Bang of the Universe (wiki it at the big bang) happened, but they couldn't identify it at first. With learned knowledge and experience, they figured out where it was coming from and how it was created.

Same thing here. These social technologies are being lumped together as the Big Bang of the Internet, They call it web 2.0. The groundswell is already underway, people are consumed with the various techniques to connect with each other, are creating communities that are effecting change, and are creating content and ideas that could never have been aggregated. These changes come in the form of interlocking relationships within newly created communities or networks. These networks do not exist in any physical sense (we all know what a networking event is or was), they do not rely upon meetings, conferences, or phone calls (think about how many people are BBM'ing each other all day long). These social communities are being formed on the Internet and then are extended into the physical space. Remember how you use to create a relationship or community of like-minded people, then it was really cool to extend that to the Internet and set up a Yahoo Group so that everyone can communicate? Very coordinated and orchestrated. Yeah, well that ain't happening anymore.

So, now you create a community of inspired folks using some social technology like a blog, a wiki or linked in to allow people to connect to each other, to create content, to build ideas, to profess knowledge, to eschew innuendo, and to self-express. It's very uncoordinated! This is the groundswell and people, companies, organizations are using this to build communities. Uh, didn't Obama announce his Vice Presidential candidate on his website? NO, he sent a text message, a BBM from his Blackberry for God's sake.

So, you better get a good widget on your website, you should add a Twitter dialogue to your blog (oh, you don't have a blog?) Tell me your not even using Facebook, My Space or Linked in? All I can say is that you better go and DIGG this.