No matter what you’re after, in the internal groundswell, the secret to thriving is culture. This is not about technology implementation but about managing and changing the way organizations work, a change that needs the blessing—or, even better, the active participation—of top echelons of management. It’s nearly impossible to force social technologies on organizations from the top down, because, by their definition, these technologies require the participation of your employees.
You can’t force them to adopt groundswell thinking, any more than you can convince reluctant managers to deploy social technologies with your customers. But it sure helps if the social technologies have an executive or two behind them.
— Groundswell by Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff