I have read chapter7-10 in these two weeks. I think I learnt a lot from the case of Dell’s reputation management. It makes me feel that it’s important to engage with the community.
The dell’s case shows us that people use social media for lots of things, but they often use it to express their opinion about a brand or organization, to tell you where things are good and to tell you where things are bad. And to complain. The brand should reply when a factual inaccuracy is being discussed, or when a customer has had a bad experience and is reporting it online. And this case remains me of another real case study I have read before. It happened in Portugal. Ensitel, a well known mobile phone store, tried to shut up a blogger using lawyers. The blogger is an Ensitel's client who bought a broken cell phone which the store refused to refund and, therefore, wrote some posts about it. This blogger was addressed this week by an order from the court to delete these posts and all social media community reacted very negatively to Ensitel action. Ensitel then began to delete all negative comments on its facebook page and, of course, everything got worse. Not happy with this, Ensitel then sent a press release reinforcing the attack to the blogger. We can image what will happen, yes, Ensitel was on all Portuguese newspapers on the next day and a lot of opinion makers were commenting on that. There's also a Facebook Group with thousands of followers named “I Will Never Buy Anything on Ensitel”. This case tells us that you have to monitor what people are saying because they are always talking about your brand.
Charlene Li and Josh Bermoff emphasize that It's all about engagement in groundswell and I think that means companies need to have the tools to listen and engage with social media and react swiftly and appropriately.
When crisis comes, if you already have a clear process for dealing with complaints and discussions about your brand online，that will be the best. You need a blog or online community that on behalf of your brand in social media let people to be up-to-date on what is happening and able to speak openly and truthfully for the brand. Otherwise, you will find it much more difficult to go in when things go wrong and take part in discussions. All in all, what you need to do is to engage first.
Social media is ready for crisis management, what about you?
When I Start a little tired of facebook, my friend introduces me into a new world: Google+, and I fall in love with it Immediately. It is easy to join into google+, because that millions of Google account user could turn it into a Google+ membership.
There are some special functions that I think make me like Google+ more attractive than Facebook to me.
The function which been most talked about of Google + is the circle. This function lets me easy to management the people I pay attention to and share issues. Use circle function, I can send status updates to specific groups. For example, I can create a music circle for friends, so I can only share the music video I just creates in the circles. Instead of friend people on facebook, I can +1 people to my specific circle now.
Another function which been often mentioned of Google + is the video group chat ---Hangouts, it can let 25 users most have video chat at the same time. When the user chat, each conversation object will appear on the small box, the speaker will appear at the top of the big window. Although recently, Facebook and Skype cooperate that video chat will be introduced into Facebook, but it only supports one-on-one conversation.
But I can not abandon facebook easily, I still can share cool links to fun or stupid youtube videos, game sites, or music reviews with their friends. And Facebook is always like a party where all your friends are having little conversations. You can listen to, interact with or ignore anyone you want. In addition, there are some advantages that Facebook has and Google+ can not catch up with in a short time, like the huge database Facebook has. According to the estimate of Facebook, every month their users upload 4 billion of articles, including news story, personal status updates, birthday wishing etc, also uploaded 850 million images and 8 million segments of video. Anyone wants to access these things can only through Facebook, and Facebook treat these information as private data, the vast majority are shielding to Google's search.
However, Google+ is still young, it has great potential. One day it will overtake Fcebook and become the most popular social media.
I finished the reading of chapter1-6 of Charlene Li and Josh Bermoff’s Groundswell at yesterday. And I keep thinking about it all the time. I always think I am good at using social media tools and know all the things about them, my friends also treat me as an expert, but now I know I am still in the “kindergarten” stage.
Social media networking become more and more important during these years and everybody starts to use them. In this web2.0 world, online social network can provides us more ways to contact with the extensive social capital. It is a huge resource, which can bring knowledge, opportunities, support, and good reputation to us. It will make us be able to accomplish more trade, get more respect, and even get a better job. And we can show more personal information, all kinds of skills, and can obtain others’ help and attention at the same time.
A lot of people (like me) understand social media on a personal usage level, but not when using it for business. In chapter 1 of Groundswell, the authors discuss the importance of companies joining the social media movement. That is because that social media is no longer for us just talking about what party they we will attend this weekend. Social media has evolved into a new way to talk about you, your company and what you do. The authors introduce different type of technologies of the groundswell and show both how they threaten companies and how we can benefits from them, and also introduce the way to evaluate a social networking.
Believe it or not, social media marketing can help your business. But, it is possible to waste a lot of time, so make sure you have a plan. Charlene Li and Josh Bermoff created a four step planning process called the POST method, witch is the foundation of groundswell thinking. The POST stands for people: I think the customers are the most important part in business, so we should know what your customers are ready for; objective: we should clear our goals; strategy: how do you want relationships with your customers to change? And technology: what applications should you build. To achieve your goals, CharleneLi and Josh Bermoff identified five primary objectives (listening, talking, energizing, supporting, and embracing) that companies successfully pursue in the groundswell. I learned the listening and talking part from chapter 5 and 6, that is you should do well communications with your customers online. While social media is free, the big resource it takes up is time — blogging takes a lot longer than Facebook (but blogging has such great return). Twitter takes more time than you think. Even you spend a lot of time on it; you may still get negative feedback. However, you should be open to it. I’d rather know when people weren’t happy so I could fix it in time.
The dell’s case shows us that people use social media for lots of things, but they often use it to express their opinion about a brand or organization, to tell you where things are good and to tell you where things are bad. And to complain. The brand should reply when a factual inaccuracy is being discussed, or when a customer has had a bad experience and is reporting it online. And this case remains me of another real case study I have read before. It happened in 
Charlene Li and Josh Bermoff emphasize that It's all about engagement in groundswell and I think that means companies need to have the tools to listen and engage with social media and react swiftly and appropriately.
