Groundswell – the new media bible

When you wake up at 3.30 am to catch an early flight (after 3 hours of sleep) and you spend the full flight reading a book, you know you have a winner in your hand. It’s not easy to keep social marketing/conversational marketing freaks and geeks thoroughly entertained while, at the same time, adding a new level of understanding and knowledge to my 100-social-media-blogs-daily-brainwashed mind. But Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff achieved this goal by writing the first new media bible titled “Groundswell”.

Targeted towards the marketing department at businesses, the insights won’t disappoint or bore the chin-stroking social media experts. Quite the opposite: “Groundswell” gives marketers enough reasons to listen to and join the conversation but warning them throughout the book to take it slowly and, in the spirit of “Meatball Sundae”,  adjust their social media strategy to their specific business and desired objectives.

The examples and case studies were fresh but I was hoping for an online extension of the book (Joseph Jaffe did a great job) and, even more important, all of us would have benefited from failure stories. There are many and we can all learn from them. But these are just constructive additions:

The writing, the case studies, tools you can use each day to evaluate your new marketing strategy and a first attempt at calculating the ROI for various media tactics should make you run out to the bookstore. Or just click here.