Groundswell, Expanded and Revised Edition

Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies

Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff

• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781422161982
• eBook ISBN: 9781422143414
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Corporate executives struggle to harness the power of social technologies. Twitter, Facebook, blogs, YouTube are where customers discuss products and companies, write their own news, and find their own deals but how do you integrate these activities into your broader marketing efforts? It's an unstoppable groundswell that affects every industry -- yet it's still utterly foreign to most companies running things now.When consumers you've never met are rating your company's products in public forums with which you have no experience or influence, your company is vulnerable. In Groundswell, Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li explain how to turn this threat into an opportunity.In this updated and expanded edition of Groundswell, featuring an all new introduction and chapters on Twitter and social media integration, you'll learn to:· Evaluate new social technologies as they emerge· Determine how different groups of consumers are participating in social technology arenas· Apply a four-step process for formulating your future strategy· Build social technologies into your businessGroundswell is required reading for executives seeking to protect and strengthen their company's public image.

1. why the groundswell—and why now?

When he woke up on May 1, 2007, Kevin Rose had no idea he was about to have the most interesting day of his life, courtesy of an uprising of his own customers.

If you have a caricature in your head of a new-age Internet entrepreneur, Kevin probably fits it. He started his company, Digg, at age twenty-seven. At the time of our interview, he sported a day’s growth of stubble and a worn gray-green T-shirt. When he speaks, you hear the familiar slacker cadences of Keanu Reeves. But if you listen, you realize this guy is sharp. Really sharp. BusinessWeek put his picture on its cover.¹ He understands the massive surge in people-driven phenomena on the Internet as well as anyone else we’ve ever met. That’s what makes what happened on May 1 all the more surprising.

Digg.com is a site where members vote and comment on news stories. Anyone can join. You click on a news story anywhere on the Internet to “digg” the story, and Digg features on its home page the most popular stories. Digg’s readers digg not just news stories but also blog posts and other Web sites—anything that’s new. There are complicated algorithms that account for recency and help prevent fraud, but that’s the basic idea. Given the enormous fountain of news bursting forth from the Internet every day, Digg is one way to sort through what’s important, as rated by votes from readers like yourself.

Six months before the events of May 1, Kevin had told us, “It’s a strange feeling to wake up in the morning and think, ‘What the hell is going to be on the front page?’” That proved to be prescient.

It started when a blogger named Rudd-O put this on his blog on April 30:²

Spread this number

09 F9 11 02 . . . Wanna know what’s so important about it?

The movie industry is threatening Spooky Action at a Distance for publishing that number, specifically with copyright infringement.

I had no idea a number could be copyrighted.

Anyhow, what is it? . . . It’s the HD-DVD Processing Key for most movies released so far.

Translation: the encryption for the new high-definition DVD format had been broken.³ With appropriate technical skill, a person could now make copies of these supposedly uncopyable supersharp DVDs, and Rudd-O was crowing about it.

For Digg’s technology-savvy audience, this was like catnip; within one day, fifteen thousand Digg members had voted for the story. As a result, a link to the secret encryption key was prominent at the top of Digg’s home page for everyone to see.

As you might imagine, this didn’t sit too well with the movie industry. AACS LA—an organization backed by companies including Disney, Warner Bros., Sony, Microsoft, and Panasonic—had created the encryption that Rudd-O claimed had been broken, and the organization decided to respond. As Michael B. Ayers, an attorney at Toshiba who is chairman of AACS LA, explained to us, “We have a legitimate right to enforce. The only reason to distribute [this key] is for circumvention”—that is, to get around the copy protection. So naturally, Michael had AACS LA’s lawyers send a cease-and-desist email to Digg. Now remember, Digg itself hadn’t broken any copyrights or hacked any code—the site was just responding to members’ requests regarding the most popular news stories, as always. But rather than risk a crippling lawsuit, Digg removed the link (and posted an explanation on the Digg blog).⁴

But lawyers and entrepreneurs aren’t the most powerful force on the Internet. People are. And people, empowered by technology, won’t always go along. Media isn’t neatly boxed into little rectangles called newspapers, magazines, and TV sets anymore. People connect with other people and draw power from other people, especially in crowds. Even Internet wizards—like Kevin Rose, whose strength comes from those crowds—are at their mercy. So what happened next was, in hindsight, inevitable.

Once the number was taken off Digg, other bloggers tracked down the number and reposted it on their own blogs. By the time Kevin woke up on May 1, there were 88 blogs that mentioned the number. By the end of the same day, there were 3,172.⁵ Over three hundred thousand people listened to a soulful acoustic guitar rendition of the twenty-hexadecimal-digit encryption code in a YouTube video posted by “keithburgun.”⁶ Digg member Grant Robertson likened the event to a quip from NewsRadio, the 1990s TV show: “You can’t take something off the Internet. That’s like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.”⁷ The controversy became news, and reporters started posting news stories about it on the Internet.

Many of these blog posts and news stories were in their turn also noted on digg.com and immediately began their march up the rankings. Digg’s management dutifully removed the ones that mentioned the forbidden code, but as in any game of Whack-a-Mole, the vermin pop up faster than you can smack them.

The next day Digg gave up. Founded on the idea that its members would be in charge of what was news, Digg found that its members wouldn’t go along with its decisions. Caught between a lawsuit and its own audience, Digg bowed to the greater force: the audience. Kevin wrote this on the company’s blog that same evening:⁸

Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d . . .

by Kevin Rose at 9pm, May 1st, 2007 in Digg Website

Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts . . .

In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. [But] we’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use . . . So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Digg on,

Kevin

By the next day, there were 605 news stories⁹ about how Digg took down the link and then reversed its decision. By asking that the story be taken down, the representatives of the movie industry had created a whirlwind of publicity, ensuring that it could never be taken down. People, by moving together on the Internet for a moment in time, had created an irresistible, ineradicable groundswell.

what happened to digg and aacs la is emblematic

Let’s take a step back for a second and examine what happened on May 1, 2007.

First, people on the Internet showed they were in charge. Any individual can be stopped, co-opted, bought off, or sued. But the Internet allows people to draw strength from each other. Digg’s members and the bloggers who posted the forbidden key weren’t part of some secret society; most of them didn’t even know each other. But blogs, sites like digg.com, and the Internet in general allowed them to connect to each other, to feel unafraid, and to be powerful.

Second, the online world swamped the offline world. People on the Internet overpowered the entire movie industry and all its legal apparatus. Real-life physical-world products, in this case HD DVDs and HD DVD players, were affected. The Internet is not some sandbox that can be walled off anymore—it is fully integrated into all elements of business and society.

Third, the people involved weren’t stupid or clueless. AACS LA includes incredible engineering talent; Michael B. Ayers is a very thoughtful attorney. The movie industry understands technology. Kevin Rose “gets it” about the Net. None of this made any difference.

This is no isolated incident. Here are others from around the globe, some now famous. (Many of these, and others, were documented in Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba’s book Citizen Marketers¹⁰ ):

• Pilot Gabrielle Adelman and photographer Kenneth Adelman decided to photograph the entire California coastline (see their work at www.californiacoastline.org). Singer Barbra Streisand insisted that photos of her house be removed, which was about as effective as trying to get rid of a hornet nest by hitting it with a baseball bat. Of course, the resulting publicity caused people to copy the photo and post it to sites all over the Net, easily found using Google Image Search on “Barbra Streisand house.” Mike Masnick, a blogger for Techdirt, coined the term Streisand effect for events where attempts to remove content from the Internet cause it to spread broadly instead.¹¹ So not only is Barbra Streisand’s house still visible online—now her name has become synonymous with futile attempts to remove content from the Net.
• More than a million viewers have watched a YouTube video posted by law student Brian Finkelstein,¹² who filmed a Comcast technician who fell asleep on his couch in 2006, waiting on hold for help from the Comcast home office to fix an Internet problem. This video is now the top result when typing “Comcast” into the search box on YouTube.
• New Line Cinema took on a movie project titled Snakes on a Plane that it planned to complete and release in 2006. Word got out, fan sites spread, and before long, Snakes on a Plane belonged to the Internet. In the absence of any actual marketing materials, fans created hundreds of unofficial T-shirt designs at cafepress.com. An unauthorized blog, Snakes on a Blog,¹³ became a focal point for fan activity; 8,360 other blogs and Web sites linked t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Introduction
• PART ONE: UNDERSTANDING THE GROUNDSWELL
• PART TWO: TAPPING THE GROUNDSWELL
• PART THREE: THE GROUNDSWELL TRANSFORMS
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Authors