Ok, I’m sure your wondering, what do chicken wings and Groundswell have in common?  The truth is absolutely nothing.  I just so happened to be eating chicken wings today while reading Groundswell.  (A challenge in itself)  Big props to co-authors Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff.  Anyway the book looks into a very interesting phenomenon that takes place online. The Groundswell.  A Groundswell is what happens when a message, article, song, website, review, video or anything else you can think of gets spread around the web in an uncontrollable fashion whether good or bad. Li and Bernoff have a great analogy for trying to stop a groundswell.  “It’s like trying to take pee out of a pool.”   Anyway, I just came across one of many tidbits of advice from the book.  As Partner and Creative Director for The Ocean Agency and SEO Group I am always interested in who is talking about us, whether good or bad.  As I am sure you are all aware, Delicious.com is a great social bookmarking site where you can store and share bookmarks of your favorite websites.  Well, it never actually occurred to me to do a search in Delicious and find out who was talking about my company and my competitors.  So I tried it.  Very interesting. Thank you Groundswell for showing me this very significant fact that was starring me in the face and yet somehow I missed.

Ok, real quick, back to the chicken wings.  While this was all going on I could not help but think of how my life would be so much easier if the chicken wing company would collaborate with the plastic company and the ranch dressing company to make a wider more oval dipping container so my whole chicken wing could fit in the ranch dressing.  Maybe this already happened.  Maybe this product already exists but the ranch containers I always get are always small and circular.  I always feel like a glutton when I find myself pouring the ranch dressing all over my wings before I shove them into my mouth.

Till next time…