Listening to the groundswell: what it means to you???

Listening is perhaps the most essential neglected skill in business. Whether you choose to start a private community, engage a company for bran monitoring, or just use the available tools to do rudimentary listening on you own, your organization must get started. Here are six reasons why:

• Find out what your brand stands for. You know the message you're trying to get across. How is that different from what people are talking about
• Understand how buzz is shifting. Start listening, and you have a baseline. Keep listening, and you understand changes.
• Save research money; increase research responsiveness. If you do a survey once in a whale, listening is more expensive. But if your company has a regular research budget, some of it should go to listening.
• Find the sources or influence in your market. Who's talking about your product? Are the bloggers more influential, or are the discussion  forums? Are thousands of people watching videos about it on YouTube? Once you find the influencers, you can cultivate them.
• Manage PR crises. If your company is going to suffer an assault from the groundswell - a negative YouTube video, a rapidly spreading blog, bad buzz on forums - you'll hear about it earlier if you're listening.
• Generate new product and marketing ideas. Your customers use your products and services all the time. They generate lots of intelligent ideas about those products and services, and they will offer those ideas to you-for free.

Arkaim

 (Russian: Аркаим) is an archaeological site situated in the Southern Urals steppe, 8.2 kilometres (5.1 mi) north-to-northwest of Amurskiy, and 2.3 km (1.4 mi) south-to-southeast of Alexandronvskiy, two villages in the Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia, just to the north from the Kazakhstan border.

The site was discovered in 1987 by a team of Chelyabinsk scientists who were preparing the area to be flooded in order to create a reservoir, and examined in rescue excavations led by Gennadi  Zgdanovich. At first their findings were ignored by Soviet authorities, who planned to flood the site as they had flooded Skarlet earlier, but the attention attracted by news of the discovery forced the Soviet government to revoke its plans for flooding the area. It was designated a cultural reservation in 1991, and in May 2005 the site was visited by then-President Vladimir Putin.

Although the settlement was burned and abandoned, much detail is preserved. Arkaim is similar in form but much better preserved than neighbouring Sintashta, where the earliest chariot was unearthed. The site was protected by two circular walls. There was a central square, surrounded by two circles of dwellings separated by a street. The settlement covered ca. 20,000 m2 (220,000 sq ft). The diameter of the enclosing wall was 160 m (520 ft). It was built from earth packed into timber frames, and reinforced with unburned clay brick, with a thickness of 4–5 m (13–16 ft). and a height of 5.5 m (18 ft). The settlement was surrounded with a 2 m (6 ft 7 in)-deep moat.

There are four entrances into the settlement through the outer and inner wall with the main entrance to the west. The dwellings were between 110–180 m2 (1,200–1,900 sq ft) in area. The outer ring of dwellings number 39 or 40, with entrances to a circular street in the middle of the settlement. The inner ring of dwellings number 27, arranged along the inner wall, with doors to the central square of 25 by 27 m (82 by 89 ft). The central street was drained by a covered channel. Zdanovich estimates that approximately 1500 to 2500 people could have lived in the settlement.

Surrounding Arkaim's walls, were arable fields, 130–140 m by 45 m (430–460 ft by 150 ft), irrigated by a system of canals and ditches. Remains of millet and barley seeds were found.

The 17th century date suggests that the settlement was about co-eval to, or just post-dating, the Indo-Aryan migration into South Asia and Mesopotamia (the Gandhara grave culture appearing in the Northern Pakistan from ca. 1600 BC, the Indo-European Mitanni rulers reached Anatolia before 1500 BC, both roughly 3,000 kilometres (1,900 mi) removed from the Sintashta-Petrovka area), and that it was either an early Iranian culture, or an unknown branch of Indo-Iranian that did not survive into historical times.

Some interesting things about Groundswell

We created an acronym for  the four-step planning process, starting with these questions, that you should use to build your groundswell strategy. We call it the POST method, for People, Objectives, Strategy, and technology. Post is the foundation of groundswell thinking - a systematic framework for assembling your plan. Let's walk through the four steps in a little more detail:

• PEOPLE. What are your customers ready for? What's important is to assess how your customers will engage, based on what they're already doing. Skipping this this step and making guesses about your customers might work, but you might also build a whole social networking strategy only to find that your customers are more likely to write reviews than join social network.
• OBJECTIVES. What are your goals? Are you more interested in talking with the groundswell for marketing, for example, or in generating sales by energizing your best customers? Or are you interested in tipping the groundswell internally to help your employees work together more efficiently? 
• STRATEGY. How do you want relationships with your customers to change? Do you want customers to help carry messages to others in you market? Do you want them to become more engage with you company? By answering this question, not only can you plan for the desired changes up front, but you can also figure out how to measure them once the strategy is under way. You'll also need to prepare and get buy-in from people within your company who may be threatened by changes in these customer relationships.
• TECHNOLOGY. What applications should you build? After having decided on the people, objectives, and strategy, you can move on to pick appropriate technologies.

National Park Taganai

“Picturesqueness and originality of mountain landscapes” were terms used by numerous scientists, travellers, artists and writers when referring to the mountains Yurma, Taganai, Itsyl of the southern Urals. These beautiful places,  frequently compared with well-known alpine landscapes, are known as the “Russian Switzerland” and the “Ural Tyrol”.
In order to preserve these unique nature wonderlands of the southern Urals, in 1991 the first nature national park in the Urals - “Taganai” was established. “Taganai” is located in the western part of the Chelyabinsk district, adjoining the northern suburbs of the town Zlatoust, and it covers an area of 564 sq. km.
The park stretches from north to south 52 km and from east to west 10-15 km.
“Taganai” includes some small ridges of the  southern Urals - Big Taganai, Yurma, Itsyl, Middle Taganai and Small Taganai.

Here are preserved many ecological systems in practically pristine condition - mountain tundra and meadows, sparse growth of trees at the base of mountains and relic forests. The beautiful nature of the park has always attracted the attention of many tourists from all over Russia.

Within the park are situated ancient mineralogical mines - Akhmatovskaya, Nikolay - Maksimiliannovskaya, Eremeevskaya, Zelentsovskaya, iron -Tesminskii and Taganaiskii and copper - Evgrafovskii and Nadezhdinskii, whose mineral samples are exhibited in many mineralogical collections in different museums around the  world. In "Tagnai" it is possible to find more than 70 kinds of minerals and stones.

In the territory of “Taganai” the largest deposit in Russia of the beautiful stone “Taganaiskoe”  - aventurine (the local name - taganait) is situated.

Located in the park are 8 geomorphologic (including well-known the ridge “Otkliknoi”), 4 geological, 2 botanical and 6 hydrological natural monuments, as well as natural-landscape zones - mountain tundra, middle tundra, southern tundra, mountain taiga, coniferous - broad-lived forests, and forest-steppe.

Bordering on the park is a watershed between the two largest river basins of Russia – the Volga-Kama and the Ob - Irtysh basins. The park’s river network divides into the rivers Big Kialim flowing into the Caspian Sea in the south and the Kusa with its numerous tributaries and a few small rivers - Shumga, Big and Small Tesma and Black flowing into the Arctic Ocean in the north.

The park contains many mountain streams - the most well known of these is the Belyi Klyuch (White stream) on the eastern slope of Mt. “Two-headed Hill”.  Water in these streams is weakly mineralised and in summer the water temperature does not exceed +16OC, however in the “White stream” - only from +3OC up to + 4OC.

In the Kialimskaya ravine (of tectonic origin), is situated the “Big Moss Bog” (a natural monument), that covers an area of 36 sq. km and it is the fifth in size from the 12 largest bogs in the Chelyabinsk district.

The park represents a mountain system of sub-meridianal ridges. In the western part the Nazminskii ridge (height reaching 884m asl) and its northern continuation, the ridge “Dlinnyi Mys” (Long Cape) with an average height of about 600 ì are situated. In the central part is located the Taganaiskii mountain massif, consisting of three ridges – the 20 km Big Taganai with four peaks, the Two-headed Hill (1034 m in the south and 1041 m – in the north) and the ridge “Otkliknoi” (1155 m), Kruglitsa (1178 m) and Dalnii Taganai (Distant Taganai), (1112 m); Middle Taganai (height – 959 m) and Small Taganai (height – 1033 m). To the northeast, the ridge Big Taganai passes in the ridge Yurma.  The park is bounded in the east by the Ural ridge (930 ì) passing in the north to the ridge Itsyl (1068 m). As usual the upper part of the mountains is rocky and inaccessible with rocks of amazing shapes and abrupt slopes. The “Otkliknoi” ridge is the most impressing. On the slopes of the mountains Kruglitsa and Itsyl is a continuous conglomeration of large boulders (local name – “kurum”). These stone taluses “flow down”, forming at the foot of mountains “stone rivers” – the largest of which is the 6 km Big Stone River with a width of 100-200 m. in the saddle between Two-headed Hill and Middle Taganai.