Questioning Authority

The Conference Board Review^® Article

Charlene Li wants you to go online. Right now.

"Your company's customers are talking about your brand right now on MySpace," Charlene Li writes, "probably in ways you haven't approved." A vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, Li argues in Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies (Harvard Business Press), written with Josh Bernoff of Forrester, that companies can't afford to sit back and wait for the social-networking trend to die down. Using technology to engage with customers not only alerts a company to gathering complaints but creates possibilities for valuable input; it puts managers in touch — sometimes uncomfortably closely so — with what their customers think. And no, you can't leave all this for the next generation. "The biggest mistake," she says, "is thinking that this is a fad, that companies can ignore it, that they don't need to engage, that it's for ‘those people over there' — those wacky companies for young people." Li, 42, spoke from her home office south of San Francisco. — Matthew Budman

You're as plugged in as anyone: You have a MySpace page, and a LinkedIn page, and a Facebook page, and a blog. But aren't most Americans still basing buying decisions on TV ads and mail-order catalogs?

Actually, they're not. It's quite diverse and very multichannel. People make decisions based not just on advertising but on what friends and family say. They get information by e-mail. Young people ask their social network, "I'm thinking of buying a stereo — what do you think of this one?" Or they're shopping, and they post a picture of a dress to the network and say, "I just bought this — should I return it?" And they do this in real time.

You define the groundswell as "a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other instead of from companies." Does the shift you describe boil down to companies relinquishing control?

It's not so much about giving up control as it is acknowledging that they are not in control anymore. Frankly, I'm not sure if companies ever were in control in the first place. Marketing today should be a relationship, like dating, like sitting down at a dinner party — engaging customers and talking with them and listening to them. Most of marketing and advertising today is not talking but shouting. What companies have to do is stop shouting at people and begin building and managing relationships. And this isn't easy: Most companies have had an arm's-length relationship with their customers, and it's important to realize that relationships are hard. They're messy. They're unpredictable. You make mistakes in them.

And engaging in these relationships requires a new way of thinking. Executives are looking up and realizing that there's all this stuff happening around them, and it's confusing and disorienting; they don't know what the rules are regarding the groundswell. It's a completely different world.

When you talk with executives who are just beginning to learn about using all this new technology, are they overwhelmed? It seems as though even someone who spends a lot of time online can quickly fall behind.

Sometimes I feel as though I'm describing an alien world. It can be hard to understand. People have said to me, "Oh, I've gone onto Facebook, and it's not very interesting." And my first question is, "Well, how many friends do you have on Facebook who actually use it?" You can't really understand the social world until you live in it and it becomes something organic and important in your life. This came slowly for me: About a year ago, Facebook opened its platform to everyone, and finally, people that I actually wanted to stay in touch with started joining. The site became valuable, and now I find it indispensable.

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