Groundswell to Obama: “we own your brand!”

Maybe someone should mail the Barack Obama campaign a copy of Groundswell.

I had just interviewed Josh Bernoff last week, and one piece of news began hitting me: a group organizing itself in the groundswell around the name Get FISA Right, and was using the Obama blog to tell the senator he is wrong!

Not that they would, but in case the Obama campaign takes the blog off its servers, the folks also have a Facebook group, with 1,910 members. And yes, there is content on YouTube explaining the bill they are opposing.

Get FISA Right is about Obama’s soft peddling on the issue of giving Telecom companies immunity. He had opposed it but has since revised his position.

As the book puts it, once you engage the groundswell be prepared to listen because you get “answers in high def.”

Are employees partly-owned brands?

Chris Brogan, whom I regard as a lead evangelist of social media, raises a great question: Are employees quietly becoming a “half-owned brands” of the company they work for?

Indeed, he’s referring to people like Robert (Fast Company) Scoble, and Charlene (Forrester) Li etc, who are known not for the company they work for (or leave) but for the ideas they represent.

His point needs to be looked at in the context of how organizations ought to hire, empower and work. They need not be looking for super novas but for those with star potential. Why? Because ultimately an organization’s ‘about us’ pages will be irrelevant. What matters will be not its ‘core competencies,’ ‘heritage’ or strategic business units, but its DNA made up of strands of these partly-owned brands.

I found some interesting examples.

• Rahul Sood, is a brand that happens to work for HP. He is the Chief Technology Officer of HP’s gaming business, and his blog is linked from HP but exists outside of the enterprise. He doesn’t write mainly about his employer, but about his passion in the IT world of gaming and business, about Nintendo’s Wii and batteries.
• Sun Microsystem’s bloggers may write about the products they represent, but three of them have more hits than the CEO Jonathan Schwatz’s well-known, well written blog.
• Rohit Bhargava may ‘belong’ to WPP, being senior VP of Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence, but as a marketer, speaker and author he is a brand in his own right, a satellite that casts a nice glow on the mothership without needing to hype the WPP or Ogilvy brand.

I don’t know about you, but these partly-owned brands come across as a lot more authentic. I would rather do business with a Raul Sood, than some anonymous corporate voice at the other end of a toll free number.