We'd like to come to where you work and talk to you about Empowered . All of you. All on the same day, Friday September 10, at 12:00 eastern time. Feel free to bring your lunch. We want you to embrace the innovation that come from Highly Empowered and Resourceful Operatives - HEROes , within your company. As part of the launch of Empowered, we're presenting a free Webinar . In this Webinar,

by Josh Bernoff Here's what I think about Brian Solis' book Engage .  You should buy it. And you shouldn't necessarily read it start to finish. But you'll find yourself diving in again and again when you need help with . . . just about anything social. To be fair, I was intimidated. I had promised Brian a review, but the thing is 382 pages long.

The Empowered book tour is beginning. Here's where you can meet us - and we'll be adding more events around the ones in these cities as we get closer to the dates: Josh, San Francisco/San Jose, August 23-27. Josh will be speaking at the ANA Business-to-Business Marketing Leadership Conference in San Jose on August 26. Topic "B-to-B Social Media and The Dynamics Of Peer Influence.

by Josh Bernoff The Forrester Groundswell Awards entry deadline is in two weeks, on August 27. As usual, most of you have waited until the last two weeks to enter. If you haven't entered yet but plan to, this advice is for you. Our awards process is transparent, and so are our criteria. So in interests of helping you spend your time wisely, let me tell you how to win. I'll use examples from entries already submitted, and from previous winners.

by Ted Schadler )Cross-posted from Ted's blog ( We are getting many requests for help on iPad strategies for the enterprise. It's clear why. iPads are a tremendously empowering technology that any employee can buy. My colleague Andy Jaquith has a report coming real soon now on the security aspects of iPhones and iPads, and I'm launching research on case studies of iPad in the enterprise. I am currently hearing about three business scenarios for iPad and tablets,

by Josh Bernoff Maybe you've noticed that our Web site has become Empowered . This is in preparation for our book launch on September 14, and it means a lot more than little lightning bolts in the graphic design. We have a few new tools for you to play with now . You can think of this as a tour of the new site )go ahead, poke around( or a bunch of new goodies intended to help out companies and highly empowered and resourceful operatives - HEROes - within them.

by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler Is this you? You run an annual event for the public, and you want to expose them to new ideas. For example, ways to run a business and empower workers. Or, how technology changes marketing. Or . . . you've got a good sized company and you want them to work together to generate new ideas and innovate. Or . . .

by Josh Bernoff Here's the problem. "Influencers" - that's reporters, analysts, bloggers, anyone with an audience - are targets. PR people are the ones who want to influence them. The PR folks subscribe to databases from companies like Cision and Vocus and then send out hundreds of undifferentiated press releases )it's called "spray and pray"(. Some of the pitches are more targeted, but based on my own inbox , most of them aren't.

Something very cool has happened. The folks at Harvard Business Review have accepted and published our article about the concepts in Empowered . This article is a great introduction to the ideas in Empowered. It talks about how empowered customers place demands on companies, and how it takes empowered employees - highly empowered and resourceful operatives, or HEROes - to fight back. It's a nice introduction to the HERO Compact between HEROes, IT, and Management, as well.

It used to be that just launching a social application made you a marketing leader. Now everybody's doing it. Some people just run campaigns. Doritos' Super Bowl ads are a great example. So are little applications like Mad Men Yourself , where you can make your own icon to represent yourself as a Mad Men character. These are great, but they don't really change companies. They also don't challenge the organization - they get launched, they run, and even if they last,

by Josh Bernoff PTC is a company with 5,000 employees and 25,000 customers. It makes CAD )computer aided design( and PLM )product lifecycle management( software. The story of what it took for PTC to create a customer community is instructive, because it's not a straight line. In real companies, it's not easy to create social applications, so there's a lot to be learned from PTC. This is a good example of the kind of management stories we have in Empowered .

We first started the Forrester Groundswell awards in 2007. What a great run! We've seen applications like the one that the amazing Pete Williams used to raise a million dollars for recovery from Australian brush fires and the one that remade the rules for NASCAR . And for the people who created these award-winning applications, the awards have given them the recognition that helps them justify the great work they do. This year,

by Josh Bernoff A Twitter account called @BPGlobalPR has been trashing and mocking BP for a while now. The new development is that he's blogging about what he's doing and why . What should BP do about this? Nothing. BP's first job is to fix the spill. Any other activity now is pointless and won't help. The PR department at BP's job is describe, accurately, what they are doing. Any attempts to spin are pointless and will backfire.

by Josh Bernoff Go ahead. Name me one company of a significant size whose business suffered due to its treatment of people's private data. Unless I'm missing something, you can't. TJX put 45 million credit cards at risk. Do you even remember )it happened in 2007(? Has anybody stopped shopping at TJ Maxx? Can't see the impact. In the online world, I can't name a single significant company that had a problem. They pay lip service to being concerned about privacy, but in fact,

Charlene Li's book Open Leadership has generated some discussion about what it means to lead in a social world. I wanted to share some thoughts about leadership in the social era from our own research for Empowered. Empowered includes lessons on leadership from Scott Cook, founder of Intuit; Rob Katz, the CEO of Vail Resorts; Bary Judge, CMO of Best Buy; and the management at Dell Computer. You've read about some of these companies before,

Guest post from my coauthor Ted Schadler. As you'll see, SharePoint 2010 will be a huge force in empowering employees. Okay, so I'm a sucker for nostalgia. But being on the same stage as Gilda Radner and John Belushi and John Candy and Tina Fey was a thrill. And being in the same studio where Elvis Costello and the Attractions stopped "Less Than Zero" after a few bars and jumped into " Radio Radio " in defiance of NBC's wishes brought a rebellious, empowered smile to my face.

by Josh Bernoff Charlene Li , my coauthor on Groundswell , former Forrester analyst, and founder of Altimeter Group , has written a new book, Open Leadership . You should read it. As much as I hate to start any post or book review with a disclaimer, the backstory on what you are about to read in this post is so complicated that I must. So: no one reading this should be under any illusions as to this being an "unbiased" review. From our very close work together,

by Josh Bernoff I continue to be amazed that people are still finding Groundswell relevant, two years after we published it in April of 2008. I've watched in delight as people have adopted the name as we intended - to refer to the whole constellation of social technology phenomena, from Amazon reviews to YouTube. A twitter search on "groundswell" reveals people still discovering it, debating it, and just internalizing it as a word in the social context.

In the last month I have become even more convinced that the Splinternet is real. This is not just one of the most important trends to hit the Web in the last five years, it's a war. Facebook and Apple want to own your as much of your Internet experience as possible. I've used the term " Splinternet " to refer to a Web in which content on devices other than PCs, or hidden behind passwords, makes it harder for site developers and marketers to create a unified experience.

by Josh Bernoff I'm at Forrester's Marketing Forum 2010 in Los Angeles. We unexpected got several chances to put Empowered content in front of important audiences. Marketing leaders at a lunch meeting were intrigued by the HERO idea - we're on the right track. And when a keynote spot opened up, Augie Ray and I polished up our Peer Influence Analysis pitch and delivered it to 500 people, who ate it up.