Climbing the Ladder

The next fifty or so pages of the book begins with a volume of example cases and technographic profiles, displaying how businesses can market to their customers and improve themselves by successfully identifying how their customers interact in the groundswell, for example you wouldn't want to create a blog site for your customers if very little of them are creators. The program would cost a lot of money to start, and your customers probably wouldn't use it that often, if at all. The remaining pages discusses general strategy, has multiple step diagrams, and introduces other descriptive concepts of the groundswell, such as how using the groundswell will change the way your company does business!

As lame as it may sound, this book motivates me. It successfully convinces me that the groundswell is here, and that its important to understand and utilize. For awhile now i thought that face book, blogging, forums were just a nice way of talking to friends and family and nothing more. Based on the conversations in class supplemented with all these real world examples from the text Ive gotten a better grasp on how important this web 2.0 movement really is.

Earlier in the reading, the book describes the groundswell Social Techno graphic ladder. A hierarchy of the social behavior of users. The more a user participates in the groundswell the higher they are in the ladder, ranging from the highest a creator, to the lowest, Inactives.

For the majority of my time with the web, I would rate myself as a joiner, someone who maintains a profile on a social netwrrk (facebook), with the occasional critic on a product or service if I was very satisfied or dissatisfied.
I think that I have graduated, and transcended to the creator rung in the ladder. I started designing a company blogsite, a tool that will efficiently centralize all the important tidbits of information that needs to be passed down by the command. It could also be used by the different departments. For example, the morale department can use the blog to pole for new morale event ideas, or use it to post new morale videos they created!

I really think using this blog will allow the company to come together and share ideas and grow. Itll streamline the way we do business.

All in all ive liked the reading a lot, I really like when the book gets into the strategy of using the groundwell and I feel that there may be too many examples of its use cluttering the pages. When the writer does get focused though its really very useful information.

Groundswell first entry!

Its nice to finally identify a groundswell in terms of user generated content on the net. I was aware of the concept and what was happening out there on the web but couldn't really identify what it was. I am interested in what this book has to say because it had a great introduction. Starting explaining the groundswell and the provided numerous real world happenings of the groundswell in action. People truly are powerful now with the culture web 2.0 has brought. The analogy of groundswell to jujitsu is a great way for me to visual just what this book is getting at.

Im starting up chapter 3, which discusses the social technographics, aka how people actually interact and participate in the groundswell...ill post again after i read the next 2 or 3 chapters.