by Josh Bernoff About a year ago I devoted myself to finding the biggest, coolest, most important book we at Forrester could write. We reviewed all the potential choices and then decided we should do a book about customer experience. Forrester's Customer Experience team has been working for 14 years now on the idea that improving the experience your customers have is the most important thing you can do for the growth and profitability of your business.

by Josh Bernoff I was delighted to get the chance to interview Dave Carroll, creator of the amazing  "United Breaks Guitars" video , for my book Empowered. Luckily for me, my relationship with Dave went beyond an interview. I know a little more about his story, and a fascinating story it is. Now you can hear that story, too, since he wrote a book about it: United Breaks Guitars: The Power of One Voice in the Age of Social Media. Here's the foreword I wrote for Dave's book.

by Josh Bernoff The debate about the value of Facebook fans continues to rage on . I hate raging arguments in the absence of solid evidence. So I was delighted to see that analyst Gina Sverdlov of Forrester Research had applied actual statistical modeling to addess the question, in a new report called " The Facebook Factor ." Gina's technique is simple to understand. Using a statistical technique called logistical regression,

by Josh Bernoff A headline stating that Mitt Romney was dropping out of the presidential race and endorsing Rick Santorum appeared at the top of Google News on Sunday. It was clearly false. How did this happen? It starts with the bloggers posting on news sites. Len Burman blogs for the Forbes site as " The Impertinent Economist ." Len is no joker. He is the Daniel Patrick Moynihan professor of public affairs at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University,

Thoughts on watching the fascinating interplay between Mike Diasey, Ira Glass of the NPR radio program "This American Life," and Apple. . . In a nutshell: Mike Daisey describes himself as "Actor, author, commentator, playwright, and general layabout." He took a trip to China to see how Apple products are made in a factory at Foxconn, then wrote a monologue about it, which he delivers off-broadway in a show called " The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs .

by Josh Bernoff Due to some obscure issues regarding the way our Web content is served, the Empowered site and all the elements of it were inaccessible for most of the last two weeks. It was a strange problem, because the site was visible from inside Forrester but not from outside. This led to some charming Twitter interactions )Josh: "It's working now." Site visitor: "Um, not it's not."( Here's what I learned.

Due to Forrester's site redesign, some features of the Groundswell pages have been inaccesible on some browsers. And I've heard about it . . . many of you are still using Forrester's Social Technographics Profile tool and you're unhappy you can't see it. For easier reference, I've embedded it here. Below the tool is the code so you can embed it in your own site.  Hope this helps.

by Josh Bernoff We're arguably 10 years into the social network phenomenon )Friendster was founded in 2002(. By now we should know the main business models. But popular sites like Tumblr )no visible means of support( raise the question, are there really any other good ways to make money other than advertising? Here are the significant models: Advertising. Facebook is already making multiple billions on ads on pages.

by Josh Bernoff There's plenty of serious analysis going on about Google assembling all your data )and using it to improve your experience across devices(. This is going to make Google stickier and harder to live without, ramp up the pressures on how they expose controls on data collection and use, and increase the seriousness of possible data breaches.  But most of all, it's raised everyone's consciousness about just how much data Google collects,

by Josh Bernoff With SOPA blackouts all over the news, I wanted to take a step back and ask: do we know what piracy is ? Sounds like a simple question, but here are a few stories that show just how confused people are. In the 2000s, I wrote a Forrester report about file sharing. Our reports are available to paying clients or for a fee. But we share the reports with the people we interview as a courtesy.

by Josh Bernoff Today Forrester published survey results intended to answer the questions "Do people care if companies collect their data, and does it affect their decisions about the companies?" The short answer to both questions is, yes. In a survey of 37,000 US and Canadian online adults, we first asked how concerned people were with companies accessing their personal information. More than 70% were concerned about social security numbers and credit cards.

by Josh Bernoff I recently pointed out that Social 2012 is Web 2000 - in the hype that surrounds it, and the reality that social interactivity, like the Web, is becoming embedded in everything people do. Forrester Research just published its annual global review  )for clients( of participation in social interactivity, and it bears this theme out on a global scale. Even more fascinating are the variations around the world. If you've read Groundswell ,

Yesterday I described the start of our innovation challenge . At the end of a month we'd generated 65 ideas, and knew which ones were popular. But how to move forward? This is where our judges came in. I recruited about 15 people to help with the process. They included many senior managers here )the COO, the CMO, our new chief business technology officer , and the head of human resources( as well as new product and strategy experts, an operational expert,

When we set up our sharing system, the HERO Platform, here at Forrester Research, one explicit goal was to improve innovation. There's a virtuous circle: the innovation element would get people further into the sharing platform, and the sharing platform would give us the structure we needed to innovate. I'd like to tell you how things came out )so far(. We learned a number of lessons, things that may or may not be intuitive, which I'll call out here in bold italics .

by Josh Bernoff Christopher Hitchens just died. By all accounts he was an irascible, hard-drinking pain in the ass. In print, he took on the likes of God , Mother Theresa , Bill and Hillary Clinton , and Henry Kissinger . Here was a man who had an infinite supply of courage, a razor wit, and the irresistible drive to use it. I know Hitchens only through reading him. The argumentation is brilliant, the prose uneven but driven, and the result . . .

by Josh Bernoff Here's what it was like in 2000: the Web frenzy was underway, and the predictions for it were completely out of hand. In many ways, they were overblown. And yet the long-term impact of the Web was far more pervasive than any of us had expected, along surprising dimensions.  It's the same now. Social technology in 2012 is the Web in 2000. The predictions both over- and underestimate its significance.

This is our last installment of the Forrester Groundswell Awards: the International division, for entries from outside North America. If you think the US is where all the action is in social applications, you're way off. As you'll see from these entries, there's innovation happening in Singapore, Brazil, The Netherlands, and all over Europe that's arguably beyond anything we've seen in the states. While there is plenty of diversity here,

by Josh Bernoff When I started at Forrester, a huge intellectual presence towered over the research organization. This was Bill Bluestein, who rose to be come president of the company and inspired us all, until he died )far too young( in 2001. Bill edited me. He would read my reports and say "I don't understand." It was infuriating, because he was close to the smartest person I knew and how could he not get it? I would get emotional and explain, passionately,

If you've heard that social media doesn't work as well in Business-to-Business settings - don't believe it. We had 44 entries this year, and picked the winners you see here - just as impressive as any consumer application.

The consumer division, North America was the most hotly contested division, with 98 of the 205 entries. Every year I send out the congratulations notes ... and every year I hear back how excited the winners are. If you're building a social technolgoy application, this is the place to look for models - these are some of the most impressive applications we've ever seen. We recognized them on stage at the Forrester Consumer Forum in Chicago .