Li and Bernoff expanded upon the common challenges companies face in today's market within chapter 13 of Groundswell. They dove into the several stages of the social maturity of a company ranging from the dormant stage to becoming an empowered and intuitive company. An extremely important point made by Li and Bernoff is to not view your customers as revenue, but to look at them as a channel of communication, engagement and involvement (p. 317). I found this honestly revelational in terms of how companies and organizations should interact with their consumers, followers and customers.
Chapter 14 brings up the future of the groundswell and how it will be a part of most companies communication and social media plans going forward. While reading this, a lightbulb went off in my head, since the company I had interned for last semester utilizes the input of the groundswell for almost all of their content and future campaigns.
The company I interned for is called BYOtogo, referring to the need of bringing your own to go container to reduce single use waste. BYOtogo is an environmental start up located in the United States and promotes sustainable living tips and info, blogs about relevant climate and environmental news and cringeworthy memes.
BYOtogo utilizes Instagram and TikTok as its main forms of interaction and engagement with their viewers and followers as well as an interactive website with weekly blogs being constructed. As a startup, it is critical for BYOtogo to listen to the groundswell in order to be as successful as possible. Li and Bernoff explain the rate at which the groundswell is being used today, they explain, "The net result of all of this accelerating activity is that the groundswell is about to get embedded within every activity, not just computers, but on mobile devices and in the real world" (p. 322). This is becoming evident within the context of BYOtogo since we utilized the inputs of the groundswell to curate all of our content, blogs as well as featured sustainable products. By doing this we were able to reach our goal of 1,000 followers as well as phenomenal follower engagement considering it is a new start-up. Likewise, our accounts were notified of any important tags of large environmental agencies and news outlets which was interesting to see.
This will become so standard within most companies considering the groundswell has transformed the way transactions, reviews and ratings are conducted. Similarly, feeds will play a major role within the groundswell, "Feeds will alert us to any changed content and feed readers will be as much a part of the online experience as e-mail or browsers are now," which is honestly an astonishing thought (p. 322). I'm curious to hear any thoughts about this shift toward the ubiquitous groundswell.
Do you know of any companies or have you worked for any companies that embrace the groundswell in order to be successful? Comment and let me know!
Dan, I really enjoyed this blog! I am going to go look up BYOtogo right after I finish typing this comment. I think you did a great job bringing in the main messages from chapter thirteen and displaying how it is often new companies that are willing to use the groundswell instead of the big well known companies. I don't know if I know of any companies that are particularly doing a good job at using the groundswell. But what I can offer is that I think the publishing industry needs to use the groundswell more because people on social media are constantly stating the kinds of books they want, all publishers need to do is listening and give it to them … most of the time.
ReplyDeleteHi, Dan, I enjoyed reading your blog and knowing your company's action in the groundswell. In my opinion, it is wise for start up companies to listen to the groundswell. According to the five stages in the text book, BYOtogo did well in interacting with the audiences. Great example! And during my internship, my company also interacted with audience very often, it has already built up its own IPs, and has gained a lot of loyal followers.
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