Well, I bought the book Groundswell – its great. Last week I defined the Groundswell. This week I’m going to talk about the 5 things companies can do to engage with the Groundswell.

1. Listening – this already exists in trad. company form called research. This entails monitoring the conversation your customers are having with each other.

2. Talking – this is what we usually call marketing. “Participating in and stimulating two-way conversations your customers have with each other”.

3. Energizing – sales. Finding the lead customers and using their enthusiasm to sell each other.

4. Supporting – Support. Using groundswell tools like social networks to and social forums to enable your customers to support each other. Support

5. Embracing – Development. Integrating your customers into the way you do business. Your lead customers will have great ideas for new design and product offerings.

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Forrester Research recently published a fantastic book explaining the social web phenomenon and how companies can harness its energy.

The “Groundswell” is how your customers define you in the social web by talking about you on Facebook, listing you in Wikipedia and posting user-generated videos on YouTube.

This inevitable force will only continue and is creating lasting, permanent change to the way business is run.

One of the great concepts I pulled from this book is the idea of Social Technographics – defining how your customers interact on the web. Listed by level of engagement on the social web from the top down there are: Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators, and Inactives. Each age group, gender, and nationality has a general profile. This is the first step in identifying where your customers hang out on the web and the best approach to engage them.

Click here for Forrester’s free profiling tool.

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