If you’re in community marketing or engaged in social media initiatives for your company. Quit reading this post (not really), but at the earliest opportunity go find this book on bookshelves and buy it – Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff (Forrester).

Why buy Groundswell?

To learn more from gold-standard examples of how companies; big, small and everything in between and furiously leveraging social media to engage with their communities. IMO, the unique case studies is the single biggest reason a marketing manager would want to buy this book or maybe share with their peers and/or skeptical CEO.

An example of that would be HP’s core community team, run by Alison Watterson, who found mention in Groundswell. Here are some interesting tidbits about that team that I gleaned from the post. This is an example that’s applicable to any Fortune 500 company that’s wrestling with social media.

What is HP’s core community team?

It is one of very few truly cross organizational groups that is comprised of  people with Web marketing jobs throughout the company.  This means that everyone in the group participates in addition to our regular  job responsibilities .  Each of us is passionate about social media and often (but not always) are engaged in our individual business units online social activity.

What does this team do?

The group is responsible for reviewing and approving new blogs (not individual blog posts just brand new blogs).  The group also tackles new developments in the social media space.

Read the entire post here

If you liked this post, you’ll want to check out the following posts I’ve written in the past

1. My LinkedIn Experience (my panel discussion at SXSW 2008)
2. Sony gets corporate blogging? – (senior exec blogging case study)
3. Apple – their MobileMe blog saga (work in progress)
4. Cisco-Apple blog fight! (where blogging helps)
5. Southwest Airlines is nuts about blogging (oh! yae)

Does your company blog?

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