As you think about the debate about Forrester's blogging policy, I'd like to share a little more about how the opinions you read from Forrester analysts come about. With 15 years experience in this business, I know it's a collaboration. The analyst needs data and support from the company, and the company needs the analyst's brain and benefits from the reputation that analysts build up. A lot of time, resources, and quality standards go into what we do.

Note: This post is from Cliff Condon, Forrester's VP in charge of our social media efforts, and represents the company's official position on the topic of analyst blogging. Wow.  There are a lot of comments flying around about Forrester's yet-to-be released blog platform and associated policy â€" some accurate, some not.  The blog posts from Forrester analysts like Josh Bernoff   and Augie Ray have had the most accurate information to date.

by Josh Bernoff I'm not a corporate spokesperson for Forrester. But as a prominent social media analyst here, I wanted to comment on the recent discussion regarding our policy on analysts and blogs. Forrester is and has always been a leader with analyst blogging. Charlene Li started this blog you're reading in 2004. We love blogging. And many of our colleagues that came from Jupiter, the company we acquired in 2008 are also avid bloggers.

by Josh Bernoff That social media project you are working on. Is it worth it? The iPhone app - is it going to pay off, or just drag your job into the toilet? Our new book Groundswell HEROes is about highly empowered and resourceful operatives )that's you, if you're considering, building, or managing a technology project that touches customers(. As we reviewed these projects,

by Josh Bernoff Since I published the post about the Splinternet Tuesday, a lot of discussion has been flying about. See the comments on that post, the post on Advertising Age , and my interview with Kai Ryssdal on Marketplace. First, let's be clear. It's the Internet applications that are splintering, not the Internet itself. The most splintered of these applications is the Web, but there are others )tried running Skype on your iPhone lately?(. Second,

by Josh Bernoff The golden age of the Web is coming to an end. Prepare for the Splinternet. As we all gird for the launch of the Apple Tablet, take a moment to step back and realize what all these new devices are doing. The whole framework of the Web )and Web marketing( is based around the idea that everything is in a compatible format. Any browser, any computer, any connection, you see pretty much the same thing. Now with iPhones, Androids, Kindles, Tablets,

by Josh Bernoff Seth Godin's Linchpin is a remarkable book. You should buy a copy . )It's available on January 26.( Unless, of course, you're enjoying that rut you're in. First of all, let's acknowledge that Seth is a polarizing figure. He is the god of small business, and his books like Permission Marketing have transformed the way people think about marketing. But his books are written to persuade and inspire,

by Josh Bernoff I pay my bills electronically. When possible, I get the bills sent to me electronically. Companies like Citibank )my credit card company(, Bank of America )my bank(, and Comcast )my cable company( like it that way. Less paper for them. Comcast calls it an "ecobill" to try to make me feel good about saving paper. This is supposed to be the new way we all live, in the Internet cloud. Paper is so 20th Century. But if you do your personal business in the cloud,

by Josh Bernoff Two and a half years ago, Charlene Li and I introduced Social Technographics , a way to analyze your market's social technology behavior. Social Technographics was carefully constructed, not as a segmentation, but as a profile )that is, the groups overlap(. That's because the actual data told me that people participate in multiple behaviors, and not everyone at a higher level on the ladder actually does everything in the lower rungs. Well, it worked.

I ask many people I don't know to help me - to share numbers, interviews, etc. Often they say yes. I am grateful. Many people who don't know me ask me for help. Often I say yes. But many of those requests are presented so poorly they make me cringe. Basically, if you want my help, take a few moments to know who I am. If you send me what is clearly a mass email asking for help, forget it. There is a right and wrong way to do this. This post is about the right way. First off,

by Josh Bernoff As the decade I call the twenty-oh's ends, think on what a transformational change we have just all witnessed. Our obsession with the latest product from Google or Apple often clouds our recognition of the long-term effects. We all know where we are . But I think many of us have forgotten where we were , and just how dramatically things have changed in ten short years. Bill Gates in 2001 called this new decade "The Digital Decade." Boy was he right.

by Josh Bernoff Emily Riley and our whole Groundswell team have just published our predictions for 2010 . We serve interactive marketers, so these are marketing focused predictions. They are: Companies' use of social councils will attain budgets and power. Listening Platform insights will go mainstream. Marketers will focus less son fuzzy social media metrics and more on real marketing metrics. Twitter will become profitable or get acquired.

In two years of research with people in marketing, sales, and other customer-facing parts of companies, here's what I've seen: it takes guts, caginess, political skills, and energy to launch something new. The people who do this are amazing people. Like Boyd Beasley at Electronic Arts, who built a system so people could contact technical support from within the games his company creates. Like Barry Paperno from FICO,

by Josh Bernoff Since we published our 2009 Social Technographics Profile update , Canadians have been hounding me. Why did we leave Canada out? Simply because the Canadian data comes from a different survey, which was not completed in time. Thanks for waiting, Canada. We just published Nate Elliott's 2009 Social Technographics Profile of Canadian consumers )full text and data available to clients(.

by Josh Bernoff For several months now we've been researching "Harnessing the Groundswell", the followup book to Groundswell. The focus is on both empowered customers )think " United Breaks Guitars "( and empowered employees. In both cases, the empowerment comes from the pervasive social, mobile, video-enabled, cloud-propelled technology available to them. A funny thing happened during the research, though. We found that all the employee examples were in marketing, sales,

by Josh Bernoff From my Marketing News column. The problem with market research is that, while it can generate some pretty actionable insights, it's expensive. If you do surveys, it's always a struggle to get enough people to generate a large enough sample without breaking the bank â€" and when the survey's done, pray you don't find out that there was some question you forgot to ask. For qualitative feedback, there's always the trusty focus group,

Groundswell )the book( continues to spread. What excites me most is the number of times I hear "I gave copies to my staff/clients/customers to help them understand the trend." If you did this, I humbly thank you.You are the reason the book is still spreading 18 months after publication. If you were thinking of doing this, let me gently encourage you by signing )up to 100( copies for your clients. I'll ship them back to you for free, too.

by Josh Bernoff Mobile is a big part of our new book " Harnessing the Groundswell ". To that end, I'm looking for your suggestions for the best mobile applications. It's my contention that consumers are surrounded by more information, with more immediate access to it, than ever before. Mobile Internet access )but also mobile email and SMS text messages( are a big part of that. Mobile applications can get access to location, a camera, your identity, your phone number,

by Josh Bernoff The pharmaceutical industry and the FDA are in a strange position.   People are discussing drugs and treatments all over net, from WebMD to the American Cancer Society's Cancer Survivors' Network . But pharmaceutical companies can't encourage or participate in this activity in any way. In one case in my research ,

by Josh Bernoff Where do you go when you need the answer to a question? While writing the first chapter of Harnessing the Groundswell , I wanted to cite a case - a movie that recently tanked due to bad online buzz during its first weekend. I recalled the example, but not the movie. Did Google have the answer? I tried combinations like " movie tanked word of mouth " and got nothing. )There is a right combination of words to get this - can you guess it?