The Future of Groundswell

By: Charlene Li and Josh BernoffMon Jun 30, 2008 at 11:02 AM

In the book, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff write about how social media -- blogs, wikis, Facebook -- has impacted the way customer's interact with your brands. These elements of a social phenomenon -- the groundswell -- has created a permanent, long-lasting shift in the way the world works. Most companies see it as a threat. You can see it as an opportunity.

"Groundswell" by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff

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Jason Korman makes wine. He's made wine his whole life. That's how he knows it's a terrible business.

Success in running a small winery is pretty close to impossible. There are thousands of new wineries all around the world. Distribution is challenging. Awareness tends to come from magazines like the Wine Spectator, where it can take months to get a review -- if you're lucky. So when Jason Korman started his winery, Stormhoek, in South Africa in 2003, he knew he needed a different approach to reach people. He decided his wine would be the first to succeed through the groundswell.

Jason realized the key was to concentrate on the experiences wine is a part of, not the wine in the bottle. "Wine is a social lubricant," he says.

"While we care passionately about wine quality, we really believe that wine is about what happens after you open the bottle." The groundswell thinking in Stormhoek's approach was to encourage people having a good time with his wine to talk about it. That's why one of his first strategies, in June 2005, was to send bottles of Stormhoek vintages to 185 bloggers in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Try our wine," he told them in a little booklet that came along with the wine, suggesting that they write about it if they liked it, or even if they didn't.

The result of all this activity was that by the end of 2005, 305 blog posts mentioned the wine. Stormhoek had created a new meaning for "wine buzz."

One key to this success was the connection Jason made with Hugh McLeod, an American blogger who draws devastatingly sarcastic little cartoons on the back of business cards and posts them regularly on his blog at www.gapingvoid.com. Hugh partnered with Stormhoek. The assets Hugh brought were his international following, his catchy graphics (which now grace many of Stormhoek's bottles), and his intuitive feel for what works in the groundswell. Hugh's little pamphlet that accompanied the gift wines gave the whole exercise credibility and authenticity, which probably led to the wine being featured in so many blog posts.

Two years later, Stormhoek's $1 million wine business had grown to a $10 million business. Jason has continued to build on the success among bloggers with a Facebook group, YouTube videos, and Flickr photos (he suggests you post mementos of your "geek dinner" with Stormhoek wines, or a photo of yourself outside the local Tesco food store with a bottle you bought). And all these activities have generated their own cloud of publicity, with mentions on CNN and in Advertising Age. Stormhoek even managed to get Microsoft employees interested in a private-label vintage featuring a Hugh McLeod illustration with the words "Change the world or go home," a sentiment many Microsofties embrace.

Stormhoek lives in the groundswell. The Internet is Jason Korman's marketing department. Jason and Hugh have created a company firmly embedded in the social fabric across multiple countries, and it's not some ethereal start-up -- it sells a real physical product that takes sweat to produce and comes in bottles. Jason Korman is not a stubble-faced Internet entrepreneur, either -- he's forty-seven. The difference between Stormhoek and nearly every other company in this book is this: Jason and Hugh live in the groundswell and know they will grow as it grows. They're natives.

You should learn to think as they do.

Groundswell technologies are exploding. They're cheap and easy to create and improve, they tap easily into the Internet advertising economy, and they connect people who naturally want to connect.

The net result of all this accelerating activity is that the groundswell is about to get embedded within every activity, not just on computers, but on mobile devices and in the real world. This is the ubiquitous groundswell. What does that mean?

It means social networks will connect people with the groups they care about. Transactions will be constantly rated and reviewed. Tags, supplied by ordinary people, will reorganize the way we find things. Feeds will alert us to any changed content, and feed readers will be as much a part of the online experience as e-mail or browsers are now.

It's hard to imagine what this world will be like. So rather than explain it, we'll take you on a tour. Let's spend a day in that future.

The net effect of all these changes will be much broader than the individual parts. When the groundswell surrounds you like a cocoon, when you breathe it like air and depend on it always, the world will feel very different.

Imagine for a moment that you're in marketing at a shoe company. You wake up on December 1, 2012. What will your day be like?