The Oh-So-Social Technographics Profile: A Combination

             In reading Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li’s “Harnessing the Power of the Oh-So-Social Web,” I was intrigued to see how the widespread use of social media would affect marketing efforts within a company.  I like how we are now taking these tools one step further to see the ways in which their use is affecting and permeating traditional business processes.  What interested me most about this article was the fact that it wasn’t a discussion of how corporations can use social media within the company, but how the prevalence of social media in our society and the accessibility of these platforms to consumers are changing what companies must do to uphold the brand and image of their product or products.

                I think this article connects to my blog from last week, from Tapscott and Williams’ Wikinomics. They indicated the ability of citizens to act globally, just as companies should, with the increased possibility of digital creation, and this relates to the point that Bernoff and Li are suggesting about social media in regard to marketing.  While companies used to be in control of marketing messages that they set forth, customers are now “empowered by online social technologies such as blogs, social networking sites like MySpace, user-generated content sites like YouTube, and countless communities across the web,” making it harder for companies to control what is said about their products. This is where this article relates to their other article, “The Social Technographics," because it started to get me thinking about what motivates people to turn to the web to voice their opinions or seek out others’ opinions on products and services that companies provide. I think the authors made a good point in their suggestion for trying to understand the groundswell—the participants first need to be dissected and understood. While the roles individuals play in the groundswell are very different, they all work together to create the phenomenon and business strategies for embracing it must undoubtedly account for their audience and how these groups may differ. Because customers can create their own content and distribute their own messages about companies, people are beginning to draw more from each other in regard to companies and brands—they contribute to as well as listen to what others are saying, rather than what the company is saying.  People have an increased ability to find out the information they are looking for from other consumers like themselves, rather than from the company directly, which is undoubtedly impacting the power and control that the companies in the marketing world. Believe it or not, executives, the power is tilting toward the customers, and this is, as Bernoff and Li contend, the most difficult realization for companies to make.  The decision to engage with these groundswell phenomena is contingent upon the acceptance of this very fact, that the company must relinquish control to its consumers, although it is not the only thing that must be done to participate effectively.

                While the authors provide a detailed and strategic framework for incorporating applications to embrace the groundswell movement, it was a seemingly trivial part of the article that I appreciated the most. Since I am not a business school student, and have never really studied business practices before now, it was helpful to me, as someone who is not familiar with a lot of technical business terms, that the purposes of the various different applications for different departments were summarized by and supplemented with simpler concepts like “listening,” “talking,” and “energizing.”  Though the intention in doing this was to indicate how it’s different from traditional department functions and processes, it also made it clear to me what the authors were suggesting that these applications should do with or for the customers, which aided my overall understanding of the whole article.  I could easily decipher the purpose of the social applications as well as easily connect them to the business goals they would help to accomplish.

                Something else that caught my attention and that relates to what we have frequently spoken about in class was one of the authors’ key recommendations for companies attempting to harness the power of the growing virtual, social world: “stay focused on culture, not technology.”  This reminded me of what we continue to say about how the social tools and technologies are not the main concern, but rather what they can do for businesses and people in general. Therefore, the authors are in agreement, suggesting that organizations need to keep in mind what purpose the social media platforms are fulfilling and how this is changing the culture of their business, rather than concerning themselves with how the tools are changing. Tools are inevitably going to vary; it is the implications of these tools and how you can employ these technologies successfully to achieve the goals that are intrinsically related to your company’s culture. Bernoff and Li suggest that “it’s about embracing customers and their ideas.” On a similar note, in “The Social Technographics,” the authors assert that the challenge isn’t about mastering the technology but whether or not the tool(s) are succeeding in accomplishing a useful business goal.

 *My questions, then, are: In your work experiences in the business world, what types of cultures have you seen? Do you think there is a specific culture that is conducive to engaging in the groundswell? What sorts of business goals must be present for this sort of engagement with customers to be worth it for the company?  For which of these business goals would participating in the groundswell be most beneficial?*