While the wildly successful “Groundswell” book by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff continues winning acclaim — most recently from the American Marketing Association — Josh has announced work in progress on a new book. This time, he’s teamed with Ted Schadler as co-author.
The title is “Harnessing the Groundswell: Drive Your Business With Empowered Employees and Customers”. The authors say this next Groundswell book is not a sequel…
“It focuses on individuals empowered by technology — both employees and customers — and how businesses can efficiently turn them into a force for better performance.” - Josh Bernoff
Look for the book in summer 2010 from Harvard Business Press.
Josh is carrying forward some precedents established with the first Groundswell book project. For example, you can keep up with progress and more at the Groundswell blog.
In case you missed it, Charlene Li started her new book project a few months ago. She’s engaging with the community in full force. You can vote on the title for her book right now — check out this post. I’ll write more once she settles on the title. Hers is due out in May 2010.
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Can you measure branding through tangible improvements in operations and the bottomline? Are your branding investments aimed directly at changing customer behavior? Is brand equity a myth that exists in the minds of marketers?
These are some of the questions that Jonathan Salem Baskin raises in his new book, Branding Only Works on Cattle. He talked about his ideas for rocking the branding boat at a special presentation to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco last night.
It’s easy to see that branding strategies developed for the era of mass media are not going to perform as well in the era of social media. It’s much harder to get your head around what that change would actually look like.
At least 2 of Jonathan’s ideas struck a chord with me, as they fit very well with the transition to influencer marketing:
1. Shift the branding focus away from creating fictions (mascots, celebrity endorsements, etc.) Instead, enrich the actual customer experience with your company, products, and services. The customer experience is the brand.
2. Trade in the creative marketing math for measuring branding (recall, impressions, tonality, etc). Instead, adopt standard business math. Measure brands based on real world customer behavior. Worry less about whether your YouTube vids go viral, and more about whether your brand facilitates shorter sales cycles, higher word of mouth referrals. Look to the bottomline to find the benefit of branding investments.
Jonathan is not advocating the end of branding, merely the end of bad branding habits. For example, perception-changing branding isn’t going away, nor should it. Find more about that in Martin Bishop’s perspective on the evening.
Influencer marketing is all about addressing customer behavior, as it is happening. Jonathan is challenging us to adopt some similar ideas about branding.
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Tarah Remington was in touch with Influencer50 today, with a heads up that the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) has released a draft of the WOMMA Influencer Handbook for public comment. The handbook is about best practices in the use of influencer marketing:
“WOMMA believes influencer marketing is real and here to stay. It is not a myth, or a passing fad, or the latest trend. Rather, it is one component of successful word of mouth marketing programs.”
The WOMMA handbook references Nick and Duncan’s book, Influencer Marketing: Who Really Influencers Your Customers, in the bibliography on books, white papers, and research.
WOMMA is calling for public comment from marketers, bloggers, and consumers in order to make this tool as useful and effective as possible.
Update: Found a cameo post by one of the authors, Sean O’Driscoll.
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