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Groundswell

Winning In A World Transformed By Social Technologies

by Charlene Li

I was once asked what was the best career advice I ever received -- and it was to plan for job obsolescence every 18 months, because research showed that people typically master a job in that time period and fall into a routine.

It's a testament to Forrester that I've been happily employed at the company for over nine years (that's 36 Internet years or 63 dog years). I have been continually challenged, from tackling new coverage areas, running an analyst team and the San Francisco office, to most recently, writing the Groundswell book. I've treasured the friendship of my colleagues and appreciated the flexible schedule of an analyst, especially in light of trying to strike a balance between work and my family.

Forrester has bent over backwards to be accommodating and flexible, but in the end, I have decided that I need to have greater control over how I allocate my time between work and family. As any working parent knows, there’s no such thing as balance – only a series of compromises on both the work and home front. For me and for now, that compromise needs to happen on the work front, so I have elected to leave Forrester on July 18th to have greater control over exactly when and ho

The real business model for Web 2.0: corporate clientsJune 9

by Josh Bernoff

Everyone seems to want an answer to the question "When will Web 2.0 startups start making money?" The implication is that unless we can answer the question, the "bubble" of Web 2.0 will burst and all of us who believe in this stuff will be revealed as fantasists.

The fact is, it's incredibly hard to make money as a Web 2.0 startup aimed at consumers.

There are hundreds of these companies, and they all clamor to brief us at Forrester. Each has its own twist on blogs, social networks, ratings, user generated video, or whatever. It's hard to get people to pay attention to a new tool, and the value of the tool depends on lots of participation -- the classic chicken-and-egg problem. You competitor is always one twist ahead of you. Some of these startups will succeed but the odds are one in a thousand -- you need just the right idea, at the right time, with the right push or set of potential customers, and you need to take off with such velocity that you leave the competition in the dust.

Once a startup like this does take off, there's that other pesky little problem -- monetizing the success. Google transformed the online world by first generating huge traffic, then finding a business model. But Google's success was based on a fantastically clever advertising mechanism that was automated, attracted new advertisers, and served searchers nearly as well as it served advertisers. Facebook hasn't yet unlocked that advertising gold mi

Data chart of the week: forums, ratings, and reviews around the worldJune 9

by Josh Bernoff

More data from around the world -- and from Chapter 2 of Groundswell.

As a companion to our data charts of social networks and blogs and user-generated video around the world, here's a look at forums, ratings, and reviews around the world.

Unlike our previous international data cuts, this one is far more likely to reflect cultural differences than the prevalence of specific sites in a country's home language. We again see the advanced participation of Japanese and Americans in discussion forum. Koreans participate a lot less -- any Koreans out there that can shed light on this?

As for ratings and reviews, more than one in five online consumers read them in the US, UK, Germany, and Japan. (Note that this includes only people who read them once a month or more -- there are doubtless a lot of less frequent readers of ratings.) Americans, Japanese, and Koreans are the most likely to wr

Data chart of the week: social networks around the worldJune 1

by Josh Bernoff

There's a lot of speculation about social networks, and predictions usually go in one of two directions:

This is growing and soon everybody will be on one (or more than one)
This is a fad and even the college students will tire of it eventually.

(You could also call these the "Facebook is worth $20 Billion" and "Facebook is worth nothing" factions.)

To add fuel to the debate, this week's data chart, from Chapter 2 of Groundswell looks at participation in social networks around the world.

Important caveats on this data -- while these surveys were all taken with 6 months of each other 2007, the methodologies are not the same: US is an online survey, Europe is a mail survey, and Asia is a telephone survey. In each case, the base is all online consumers, and people were asked the question "do you visit a social networking site at least monthly?" or "how frequently do you visit a social networking site?" with examples from their own country. We count only those who visit at least monthly.

That said, t

Data chart of the week: social profiles for elements of a segmentationMay 26

by Josh Bernoff

So far, all of our Social Technographics Profile examples have used consumer behavior or attitude variables, like a comparison of car owners by brand or an analysis of Alpha moms. But we're finding, increasingly, that clients don't want to hear about the profile of the customers. They want to hear about a profile of their customer segments.

Most companies that sell to large numbers of people have segmented their customers. A retailer analyzes its shoppers and finds some come for convenience, some for price, and some for selection -- and some because their mom shopped there. Or an electronics manufacturer creates low-end easy-to-use products for the technology laggards and high-end sophisticated products for the early adopters.

Segmentation is smart if you use it to design products and marketing plans for different groups of customers. If you're growing a product line, it may be essential. Typically, a research project leads to customer insights, which leads to a segmentation, which leads to actions based on those segments. So when creating a social application for these segments, you need to ask -- which strategies apply to which customers?

Here's a good example. A large communications c