Rick Clancy Seemed Worried. An excerpt from “Groundswell”

An excerpt from Chapter 1 of Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff

We were meeting him for breakfast before an all-day meeting. He was grappling with a force he didn’t understand, one that was growing all the time. Bloggers. Discussion groups. YouTube. Consumers whom he’d never met were rating his company’s products in public forums that he no experience with and now way to influence.

All were assaulting his company’s cherished brand, and traditional  PR tools were as useless as a broadsword against a rain of poison darts. Rick had decided it was time to take matters into his own hands, to become a blogger himself. For this veteran of almost two decades of managing his company’s image, the goal looked daunting. It looked like the unknown.

From where we sit, Rick Clancy is a symbol.  (Rick Clancy was the head of Communications for Sony.) He and thousands of corporate executives just like him are now dealing with a trend we call the groundswell, a spontaneous movement of people using online tools to connect, take charge of their own experience, and get what they need — information, support, ideas, products, and bargaining power — from each other. The groundswell is broad, ever shifting, and ever growing. It encompasses blogs and wikis; podcast and YouTube;  and consumers who rate products, buy and sell from each other, write their own news, and find their own deals. It’s global. It’s unstoppable. It affects every industry — those that sell to consumer and those that sell to business— in media, retail, financial services, technology, and health care. And it’s utterly foreign  to the powerful companies and institutions — and their leaderships — that run things now.

Simply put, the groundswell is a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other instead of from companies. If you’re in a company, this is a challenge.

The groundswell phenomenon is not a flash in the pan. The technologies that make it work are evolving at an ever-increasing pace, but the phenomenon itself is based on people acting on their eternal desire to connect. It has created a permanent, long-lasting shift in the way the world works.

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