By Josh Bernoff We all know the classic cases where customer service and other social failures have blown up into enormous embarrassment for companies ) Comcast Sleeping Technician , United Breaks Guitars , Motrin Moms , Dooce/Maytag , the list is endless(. Jeremiah Owyang maintains a list ; some have called them groundswells. When they happen, inevitably the social media experts, myself included, climb on board and talk about what a company should have done.

by Josh Bernoff If your company is like mine, you need to change your password every three months or so. Next time, don't just create something easy to remember that fits the IT department's arcane requirements. Think of something that will motivate you. When I was considering writing Groundswell, my password was "Writer50", a reminder that if I really thought I could be an author, I had better publish a book by the time I turned 50. What's your motivational password?

The PRSA sent this response to my post requesting that PR clean up its industry. Notionally, we support this call to action, as we do any effort that helps advance the public relations profession. However, PRSA's main mission as a membership organization is professional development and education. We have focused our efforts and resources on providing our members and the broader public relations industry with ethical guidance,

by Josh Bernoff In the 1970s, the Ad Council created the Keep America Beautiful campaign, featuring the iconic actor Iron Eyes Cody in Native American garb, shedding a tear as people littered along the highways. What that campaign changed was people's attitudes about littering. Before that, people thought, what difference does it make if I throw a can out the window? Aftwards, people realized it was wrong. If somebody in your car was going to litter, you might say "Hey,

by Josh Bernoff This is the second of three posts analyzing the contents of my inbox. Yesterday I looked at all my email . Today I take up the 51 emails I received from PR people over a week in January. Do the math: that's ten a day. My topics range has increased since two years ago, when I was exclusively covering social technology - now I cover social, mobile, internal collaboration and innovation, a range of topics. Even so,

by Josh Bernoff Is your inbox a communications channel? Or is it a target? To find out, I analyzed a week's worth of the contents of my Forrester.com inbox. )I did this two years ago ,too.( Why do this? Because I think even as we embrace social, email is still the bread and butter of many of our interactions - and it's a channel that's being clogged by out of control machines, and I don't mean spam. In one week )26 Jan to 1 Feb 2011( I received 391 emails.

Email has gone too far. Our inboxes are full of unsolicited crap. And I don't mean spam. I just mean legitimate companies of all kinds emailing us about everything. If you are a marketer, we have this Valentine's Day message for you: if you love your customer, let them go. Marketers say that they want to be responsible, and many include links and instructions in their emails to comply with the CAN-SPAM act.

by Josh Bernoff We now read that Hosni Mubarak has resigned due to popular unrest in Egypt. Throughout the coverage, we've read about how Twitter and Facebook were essential to the protesters. But in a blog post on the New Yorker site , Malcolm Gladwell says that the communications tools didn't make the difference. Defending his earlier article about the "weak ties" of social networks and how they differ from the "hearts and minds" revolutions like the civil rights uprising,

This weekend I got to see a talk at Harvard by the estimable Ira Glass of NPR's " This American Life ." If you've ever heard the show, you know it's "can't turn it off and get out of the car" radio. Ira not only told stories, he told how he tells a good story, This-American-Life style. As he put it, in a story, you have to tell the sequence )or better yet, get the subject to tell the sequence(. First this happened, then this, then that, then this.

Does Wikileaks terrify you? It probably should. Imagine a world in which everything you write might become public. Every email you send: public. You have a telephone conversation - the person on the other end takes notes. Public. Your support person insults somebody on the phone; she records and posts it. What would people think? Are you transparent enough to live this way? Wikileaks or not, this is now the world you are living in.

by Josh Bernoff Sometimes you make a mistake in the digital realm and you need to fix it. But once something is out on the Web and in social networks, you cannot erase it. Instead, you must apologize and move on. The recent shootings in Arizona have created an interesting laboratory for observing this, because they caused a lot of the people who had amped up the rhetoric to wonder if they'd made a mistake.

by Josh Bernoff Customer experience is marketing. That is, in a world drenched in social word of mouth, the way you treat your customers - and the way they perceive you - makes all the difference in what they say to their friends. With that in mind, I'd like to share some key results from Forrester Research's latest Customer Experience Index survey . We asked over 7,700 consumers to respond to three questions about 154 different companies: how well did they meet your needs,

I know from meeting and working with many of you that Groundswell has been useful. People who read it say some very nice things about what it did for them . . . and what happened whey they gave it to their boss. Well, we're finally doing a paperback edition. It will include two new chapters - one on Twitter, and one on the stages organizations go through as they adopt more social applications. It will also include a few words from you.

by Josh Bernoff Boston has always been a center for technology, but for the last 15 years or so, our eyes have glanced furtively and enviously at Silicon Valley. Clearly, Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area are the epicenter of technology startups, including the ones that have gotten huge in the Web era )eBay, Google, Facebook, . . . (. Boston is still vibrant, and we have our own old and new technology giants )EMC,

Just in time for holiday shopping, here's my list of 11 retailers who've been creative with social applications. What I like here is the diversity - we've got bricks and mortar, online only, direct sellers, and a wide variety of social applications. Thanks to analysts Sucharita Mulpuru and Diane Clarkson for suggestions. Best Buy Best Buy has built its brand on customer service, and has reflected this in the way it interacts with customers. A great example is Twelpforce ,

Are your clients in need of a little "consciousness raising"? How about your employees? I have a )somewhat self-serving( solution for you. Send them signed copies of Empowered with your own custom message inside. Just seeing the lightning bolt will brighten their recession weary souls ;-( Here's how it works: 1. Contact my book assistant, Jennifer Castaneda, and let her know you'll be sending along some books to sign.

by Josh Bernoff In a world where you need to depend on your staff to reach to increasingly empowered customers, you won't get very far if your employees don't believe in what you're doing. I mention this now because of two items I've noticed - employees in commercials and the data we collected on employee advocacy. First, as noted in an article in Advertising Age , more and now more companies are now putting actual staff front and center in their advertising.

[Reposted from Nate Elliott's blog] Social media adoption has grown in leaps and bounds over the past few years, and not just in North America. Did you know Italian and South Korean online users are more likely to engage with social media than American online users? Likewise, most of the European countries we study have a higher percentage of Conversationalists  than we find in the US. Despite this,

by Josh Bernoff Some companies have more highly empowered and resourceful operatives ) HEROes ( than others. We can actually quantify this, as we did in Empowered and in a recent report called " The HERO Index: Finding Empowered Employees " Here's how we do it. We surveyed information workers at US companies. We ask them two things: How empowered are you? We asked these workers if they agreed with the statement "I feel empowered to solve my own problems and challenges at work.

We continue the list of finalists and winners with the management division - internal applications aimed at employees. We got a good crop of entries in this division as well, since companies are increasingly adopting social applications for internal use as well as with customers. The diverse management winners included the US military, Intuit )its second award this year(, and a company that makes and sells cement.