BOOK REVIEW:THERE ARE some angry people around at Tide.com, the website devoted to Procter & Gamble's best-selling detergent brand. As part of P&G's embrace of "social technologies", the site launched a message board late last year allowing customers to share their views on stain removal and, more controversially, packaging.
Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
By Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff; Harvard Business Press, £16.99 (€22)
"The spout is useless. The detergent doesn't come out of the spout; it runs out the sides around the spout. It drips down the front of the bottle," wrote "weisway" at the end of May, of a new liquid detergent bottle.
"I am a teacher in Kansas and I think even a third-grader could find the design flaws of the push button dispenser and cap," wrote "UpsetinKansas" in March.
Perhaps someone at P&G's headquarters is listening. But while packaging is by far the most popular topic on the site (with 168 postings, against 12 for "bloodstains"), the boards contain no response to the gripes, nor has the company taken down repetitive postings.
Tide.com does not feature in this work by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, both analysts at Forrester Research. But the site illustrates both the opportunities and risks for businesses created by the evolution of the internet that they document. P&G has opted to let its customers talk openly on its website, but it has not shown it is taking notice.
The past two years have seen a number of similar ventures in online engagement by America's largest companies, from the FastLane blog launched by General Motors executive Bob Lutz in late 2005, to My Starbucks Idea, launched in March as part of the coffee company's bid to get closer to its customers.
Some have been demonstrably successful, such as the product reviews on retail sites, and P&G's Beinggirl.com website for adolescent girls, backed by the Tampax brand. Others have foundered, such as a supposedly grassroots blog about a road trip visiting Wal-Mart stores across America, which turned out to have been funded by Edelman, the retailer's public relations firm.
This, the authors say, is producing what they humorously call "groundswell approach- avoidance syndrome" in corporate managers, whose symptoms include obsessively checking blogs such as techcrunch.com and trying to get ideas to use at work by asking their teenage children: "What's up with this MySpace thing?"
Their response, an introduction to the current state of online social networking and what to do about it, is entertaining, well- written and mercifully free from techy details. They urge readers to concentrate not on technology but on the fact that it is creating connections between people. Their groundswell is "a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations".
The book, which naturally has its own online community, is built on the argument that not everyone uses the internet in the same way.
There are "creators", who blog on their own web pages, "critics" who post comments, "joiners" who sign up for online communities, "spectators" who read and watch, and finally the unengaged "inactives".
They argue that any business needs to know which group it wants to connect with before launching a groundswell initiative. Data gathered by Forrester show, for instance, that American "alpha moms" are more likely than the average American to be online spectators and less likely to be creators or joiners. They then run through possible responses to the groundswell, taking as a given that no business can ignore it.
Lego, for example, finds "Lego Ambassadors" among its AFOLs (Adult Fans of Lego), and uses them to communicate with a global online community of adult hobbyists who account for 5 to 10 per cent of the toymaker's business. Del Monte used input from an online dog lovers' community that it backed to create its Snausages bacon-and- egg-flavoured breakfast dog treats.
It also acknowledges the challenges. The authors give an interesting assessment of the return on investment for setting up a blog for a chief executive of a leading company, but they also recognise that adapting to the brave new world involves wrenching changes in the way that companies have traditionally organised everything from marketing to product development and staff relations.
Sometimes a crisis will spur change, as at Dell, where the exploding laptop fiasco of 2006 helped galvanise engagement. But the authors support a more gradualist approach, with focused projects that deliver demonstrable benefits and promote further shifts.
When even Tide looks a little lost in the groundswell, you know it is not going to be easy. -
