Charlene Li

Expert on Social Media and Marketing; Author of Best-selling Book Open Leadership

BIG IDEAS

• Open Leadership: Transform the Way You Lead with Social Technologies
  Talk with your customers. Listen to your employees. These are long-time, well tested truisms of business. But ask organizations to engage with people on Facebook or Twitter and a look of sheer terror crosses their faces. The long held concept of command-and-control leadership is being tested as organizations are experiencing the largest technological and sociological shift of our generation.
  
  In her new book, Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead (May 2010), Charlene advises leaders how to feel in command in a world where they’re no longer in control. For example, how open, how transparent, how authentic, and how real do you need to be? More importantly, how do you leverage and measure the impact of using social technologies in your organization?
  
  Charlene lays out a new approach that today’s leaders must adopt for competitive advantage. You’ll learn:
  
  • Why being open and in control is possible
  • The characteristics, skills, and behaviors of today’s “open” leaders
  • Best practices in creating a coherent and effective social media strategy
  • How to implement an “open” strategy
  
• Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
  Right now, your customers are writing about your products on blogs and recutting your commercials on YouTube. They’re defining you on Wikipedia and ganging up on you in social networking sites like Facebook. These are all elements of a social phenomenon—the groundswell—that has created a permanent, long-lasting shift in the way the world works. Most companies see it as a threat.
  
  In her book, Groundswell, Charlene Li reveals how to turn the force of customers connecting to your own advantage. Based on hard consumer data and experience with dozens of companies from Procter & Gamble to Ernst & Young to a tiny but wildly successful winery in South Africa, Charlene presents how to take advantage of communities, blogs, wikis, Facebook, and YouTube and turn this potential threat into opportunity.

SNAPSHOT BIO

Charlene Li is an influential thought leader and guide on emerging technologies, with a specific focus on social technologies, interactive media, and marketing. The co-author of the business best-seller, Groundswell: Winning In A World Transformed By Social Technologies, Charlene's newest book, Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead addresses the challenges facing leadership of the modern organization–given the dramatic adoption and impact social technologies have had on customer, partner, and employee relationships, how can companies not only manage but thrive in this new open, transparent, authentic world?  Named "One of the Most Creative People in Business" by Fast Company magazine, Charlene is the founder of Altimeter Group which provides speaking and consulting services to organizations looking to understand and thrive in a new economy driven by social media tools and techniques. You can also read insights from Charlene on her blog, "The Altimeter."

Charlene is one of the most frequently-quoted industry analysts and has appeared on 60 Minutes, The McNeil NewsHour, ABC News, CNN, and CNBC. She is also frequently quoted by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, Reuters, and The Associated Press. She is a much-sought after public speaker and has presented frequently at top technology conferences such as Web 2.0 Expo-where she now serves on their Advisory Board, SXSW, and adTech.

Most recently, Charlene was a Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. She joined Forrester in 1999, after spending five years in online and newspaper publishing with the San Jose Mercury News and Community Newspaper Company.

She is a graduate of Harvard Business School and received a magna cum laude degree from Harvard College.

A Closer Look at Charlene

FOCUS AREAS
What's on Charlene's current research agenda?

Social Technologies
How companies can use technologies like social networks, blogs, wikis, RSS, and widgets to meet their company goals. Specific topics within this area include:

• How companies can transform themselves to better meet the needs of their customers and employees.
• The future of social networks, especially around the idea, "Social networks will be like air." Included in this are new standards around data portability, Open Social, OAUTH, etc. that will lead to more open, flexible social networks that are under the control of users.
• What drives people to share and participate, and the levels that companies can "pull" to encourage participation.
• The business models and the marketing effectiveness of social media.

The "widgit-ization" of Applications
Widgets are small, bite-sized applications that can live on a desktop, Web page, or mobile device like the iPhone. The flexible, nimble development of these applications are transforming how consumers are using technology. Charlene believes in the future that the power of developing these small widgets will be placed into hands of consumers themselves.

Portals and Search
The large portal and search sites continue to be key sources of emerging technologies, ranging from better personalization to new ways to conduct search. Topics in this area include:

• The role of "portals" in the consumer experience.
• The "open" strategy of portals like Yahoo! to incorporate more content from other sites.
• The future of search, especailly around personalized, social, and semantic search.