Groundswell:
Part Three
THE GROUNDSWELL
TRANSFORMS
PRESENTED BY:
PRAVEEN MOHAN
STEPHANIE BAKER
DIANA JOHNSON
Chapter 10
HOW CONNECTING WITH
THE GROUNDSWELL
TRANSFORMS YOUR
COMPANY
CASE STUDIES – UNILEVER (DOVE) & DELL
Groundswell – Transforms your company
 Case 1
 Unilever: Parent company of brands like Axe, Lipton,
Vaseline, Dove, etc..
 Annually they spend over billion dollars in marketing
products.
 Rob Master and Babs Rangaiah helped Unilever to use
Internet as media to market their Dove Brand products.
 Dove’s 75 second “Evolution” Video on YouTube was watched
by over 5 million people in less than a year
 Dove "Evolution" Video
Groundswell - Unilever
 The “Evolution” video garnered the top advertising
awards at Cannes advertising festival, and best of all
it caused a surge of traffic to Dove’s Campaign for
real beauty website- more than double what Dove’s
2006 super bowl ad drove.
 Dove spent 2.5 million dollars to air this commercial
during super bowl whereas literally nothing for You
tube commercial.
 The largest advertising spender embraced low-cost,
low-control social technologies, but it did not
happen overnight.
Groundswell - Transformation
 The three essential elements to this transformation:
Important to take step by step
 First, mental shift takes time and practice and requires a
repertoire of shared successes, building on these stepping
stones is also essential to giving opportunity to adjust their
concepts of how things should work.
 Second, each of these stepping stones leads in a natural
progression to the next step, you need a plan and vision to take
your organization to the next level
 Third, you have to have executive support. Realistically you
need to start small and sell it to your upper management to
embrace groundswell thinking
Groundswell - Unilever
 For Dove’s campaign for real beauty in 2004, they took a
big risk by featuring everyday average women instead of
industry norm of using slender, young, perfect models.
This radical idea was well researched and it worked well.
 Dove tried to market their product using NBC reality
television show “The Apprentice”, this paid well for them
as well, as it generated increased number of hits to
Dove.com transforming into higher sales.
 The above experiences and several other led them to
experiment with the Web using the Evolution video that
became a huge success.
Groundswell - Unilever
 Lessons learnt from Unilever:

Take small steps that have big impact
Innovative campaign for real beauty
 Featuring in “The Apprentice”
 “Evolution” video


Have a vision and a plan
Transformational thinking can be maddening slow, but patience
pays.
 Top executives at Unilever had a vision of Unilever’s potential with
groundswell thinking.


Build leaders into the plan.
1.
The top executives were relentless in embracing emerging media
and give consumers the voice in the brand
Groundswell - Risks
 Sometimes business books make it look easy by
showing only success stories, companies sometimes
fail to embrace groundswell.
 An ‘X’ company spent 8 months in detailed planning
in creating an executive blog, but the idea never took
of since it was shot down by the executives, who
feared loss of control over marketing message and
prospect of getting negative comments from
customers.
 The executive team also did not have any idea about
what groundswell was.
Groundswell - Dell
 Dell is pretty advanced in using Groundswell to its
advantage.
 In fact, Dell’s entry into the groundswell began as
real trial-by-fire crisis.
 In 2001, the company started off shoring its
customer support, and its customer satisfaction
began to decline in 2005 according to a survey.
 In 2005, Journalism professor and noted blogger
Jeff Jarvis wrote in his blog about the abysmal
customer service he was receiving from the company.
Groundswell - Dell
 Dell lies, Dell sucks.. Dell Hell. These were some of
the comments he posted in his blog.
 Dell’s hell was not just a PR nightmare, starting Nov
2005, the company’s profits started dropping and
was losing its investors confidence.
 On June 21, 2006 a Dell notebook caught on fire at a
conference in Osaka, Japan,
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1042700
/dell-laptop-explodes-japanese-conference
Groundswell - Dell
 Dell’s VP of corporate group communications, Bob
Pearson and his team began tracking blog posts, but
they didn’t have ties back to the customer service to
act on complaints.
 There was no one in the company whose job was to
reach out actively to bloggers with problems.
 Dell had over 3 million customer contacts per day.
 Later , Dell setup digital media plan with a blog and
assigned a product expert to manage it.
Groundswell - Dell
 Dell started proactively responding to customer
issues, they also issued an update on the flaming
notebook at Japan.
 The blog team had access to departmental managers
within Dell so that they could respond proactively in
the blog to the issues related to them
 Taking up on the success of the blog, Dell later
launched “Ideastorm”
Groundswell - Dell
 Lessons learnt:
 It took a crisis or two to get Dell get started. Once they were in,
they really took it to the next level.
 Dell mastered one thing at a time, starting with listening.
Listening to blogs, to solving bloggers problems, to blogging
themselves, to IdeaStorm, they pulled themselves up into the
groundswell.
 Executive push and cover made the difference: Michel Dell
provided support from the top, giving Bob and Lionel the
ability to breakdown departmental silos.
 Authenticity was crucial: Dell couldn’t get anywhere in the
groundswell until it honestly admitted its flaws.
Groundswell – Preparing transformation
 Implementing Groundswell in an organization can
be minefield with full of risks, but with proper
planning you can succeed.





First, start small
Second, educate your executives
Third, get the right people to run your strategy
Fourth, get your agency and technology partners in sync.
Fifth, plan for the next step and for the long term.
Chapter 11
THE GROUNDSWELL
INSIDE YOUR
COMPANY
Employee Quote
I work retail. I inspire creativity and fun with my
employees. I grand open stores, as many as possible,
really. And I have never before loved a job and a
company the way I love this one.
My name is Ashley Hemsath, and I am Best Buy.
Tapping the Groundswell inside your company
 The bigger a company is,
the more of a problem
internal communication
becomes.
 Information tends to
flow down the ladder,
but rarely does it go back
up.
 Around the world,
employees are
connecting on internal
social networks,
collaborating on wikis,
and contributing to idea
exchanges
Best Buy: Connecting Far-Flung Sales
Associates
 Blue Shirt Nation was started by two corporate
marketing guys, Steve Bendt & Gary Koelling, who
wanted to gather customer insight on what kinds of
advertising worked.
 “We had a lot of posts that said it sucked”
 It turned out, money wasn’t what was needed to
make Blue Shirt Nation a success, participation was
The Impact of the Blue Shirt Nation
 Best Buy didn’t anticipate that Blue Shirt Nation
would not only educate management, but enable
employees to help each other.
 Some managers worry that connecting employees
will create a revolt, and sometimes it does.
The Blue Shirt Nation
(video)
Internal Groundswell Benefits
 Listening
 Talking
 Energizing
 Supporting
 Embracing
Case Study:
Avenue A/Razorfish: Collaborating on a Wiki
 Collaborating on a Wiki(Video)
Wikis are spreading through the corporate world
 Intel-Intelpedia
 Organic-Organism
Case Study:
Bell Canada: Driving Cultural Change from the Bottom Up
 The Director of Collaboration services was trying to
find a better way of dealing with ideas in the
company.
 Created ID-ah!, which allows anyone in the company
to submit an idea and then have the employees vote
on it.
 Within a year and a half, more than a 1,000 ideas
and 3,000 comments had been submitted.
 Companies should deploy social technologies
internally only when organized change is both
desirable and possible.
Strategies for nurturing the internal Groundswell
 The internal Groundswell is all about creating new




ways for people to connect and work together. It’s
about relationships, not technology.
Internal Groundswells work only when management
is listening
Plan to ramp up in stages and ease people’s
participation
Find and encourage rebels
Culture and relationships trump technologies
Chapter 12
THE FUTURE OF THE
GROUNDSWELL
Jason Korman
 Makes wine
 It’s a terrible business
 Distribution is challenging
 Awareness from magazines
 Knew he needed a different approach
Jason’s Different Approach
 Concentrated on the experiences wine is a part of
and not the wine in the bottle
 Groundswell thinking

To encourage people having a good time with his wine to talk
about it
 June 2005
 Sent wine to 185 bloggers in the United Kingdom and Ireland
 Also sent a little booklet suggesting that they write about it if
they liked it, or even if they didn’t
 By the end of 2005
 305 blog posts mentioning the wine
Results
 Partnered with Hugh McLeod
 Brought his international following, catchy graphics, and
intuitive feel for what works in groundswell
 Pamphlet gave credibility and authenticity
 Two years later a $10 million business
 Jason has continued to build success with a
Facebook group, YouTube videos, and Flickr photos



CNN, Advertising Age, and Microsoft
http://www.stormhoek.com/blog/
http://gapingvoid.com/2007/02/23/stormhoeks-jasonkorman-interviewed-on-winecast/
Stormhoek
 It lives in the groundswell
 The internet is the marketing department
 http://www.youtube.com/StormhoekWines#p/f/30/ODvfb37
nR_4
 Jason and Hugh have created a company in multiple
countries
 They live in the groundswell and know they will grow
as it grows

You should learn to think as they do.
The Ubiquitous Groundswell
 Technologies are exploding
 They are cheap and easy to create and improve
 Tap into the Internet advertising economy
 Result
 Groundswell is about to be embedded within every activity
 Social networks will connect people with the groups they care
about
 Transactions will be constantly rated and reviewed
 Tags will reorganize the way we find things
 Feeds will alert any changes in content
Let’s spend a day in that future.
 A day in the life of the ubiquitous groundswell
 You’re in marketing at a shoe company
 You wake up on December 1, 2012
 Your phone
 You’ve set it to bring you information from the Wall Street
Journal, Footwear News, and Women’s Wear Daily
 The feeds are smart
 Comment from your phone
 Receive alert that interstate is backed up
At the Office
 Check your monitoring dashboard – is it mauve or
canary yellow
 On your blog you make a trial balloon
 Search ShoeTube to find source of the buzz

Put a link in your blog and a link to your post on Super Shoe
 Update internal wiki so manufacturing and retail
relations know what you’re up to
 Time for lunch and turn your phone on private
Afternoon
 Of the 191 comments on your blog – 75% are positive
 Competitors can see this
 You have an edge
 You place an order that goes straight to your boss
and operations – no need to contact them
 You will post the news on your blog in a week or two

It will be too late for competitors to catch up
 Shoe ambassadors
 Look and see that daughter and friends are talking
about algebra on FaceSpace.soc
Groundswell Changing Companies
 Mobile Internet, feeds, communities, blogs, and wiki
 Already working right now
 Participation is missing – but rapidly on its way
 unhealthy focus on the short term –instead creation
of effective long-term strategies
 Will make incremental moves with feedback
 Will have a secure relationship with customers
Groundswell Changing Companies
 Companies will need to make the groundswell a
resource
 Product cycles will speed up
 Constant feedback
 Strategies based on deception will be doomed
Attaining Groundswell Thinking
 Advice on not what to do, but how to be!
 Developing the right attitude
 Never forget it is about person-to-person activity
 Be a good listener
 Be patient
 Be opportunistic
 Be flexible
 Be collaborative
 Be humble
Questions?