Authors: Anthony J. Bradley and Mark P. McDonald
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press; 252 pages
Book Review by: Sonu Chandiram
The authors – Anthony J. Bradley and Mark P. McDonald – are leaders in social media at Gartner. This research firm, which now has analysts in over two dozen countries, helps companies find solutions to their problems in many areas of their business.
The authors share their knowledge and experience working with more than 400 organizations in this valuable book and show you how to develop a disciplined strategy to achieve your business goals by using today’s advanced social media technologies and what they term is the “collaborative power” of customers, employees and everyone else that has a stake in your company.
The authors write about their experiences as they studied organizations as diverse as Xilinx, Ford Motor Company and the University of Chicago, and share with readers the insights they gained.
By reading this book, one learns that ideas are not the exclusive property of management and should not emanate only from a few key people in a company. Ideas are in everyone’s heads, so why not tap into them?
Customers are a natural source of new ideas and ways for a business to serve their needs, and in the process, grow, so why not find out exactly what those needs are, and how they can be satisfied?
And many employees – especially those in sales and customer service – deal with customers on a daily basis, so why not work collaboratively – management, employees, customers – to develop new methods of increasing customer satisfaction that can drive employee loyalty and rewards, and higher revenue for a company, the authors point out.
For a company to develop into a highly collaborative organization harnessing the massive strengths of social media technologies, its people must identify and develop a core set of disciplines, which include vision, strategy and purpose so that it can launch its social media campaign, guide it and, over a period of it, adapt to change in order to remain effective in achieving its purpose.
In short, these are the key disciplines they propose for you create effectively tap into the power of social media and achieve the goals you set:
Vision: defining a compelling vision of progress toward becoming a highly collaborative organization.
Strategy: taking community collaboration from risky and random success to measurable business value.
Purpose: rallying people around a clear purpose, not just providing them with social media technology.
And these are the steps you must take to turn your vision, strategy and purpose into reality:
Launch: creating a collaborative environment and persuading customers and employees to embrace it.
Guide: participating in and influencing communities as they pursue their purpose, without stifling collaboration.
Adapt: responding creatively to change by modifying your organization in order to better support community collaboration.
Today there are numerous books on employing the various popular social media to get more customer engagement for your firm, especially if yours is a large business-to-consumer company. Books abound out here on how to use Facebook, Linked In, Twitter and other social media platforms.
This book is different. Its purpose is to show you how to build competency in using these platforms to build collaboration among employees and customers. And that is easier said and done.
Without a well-thought-out and planned strategy with purpose, goals and an over-arching vision, your efforts may result in puny, immeasurable results or worse, end up in dismal failure.
If you do not want either of these outcomes, reading this book is essential for you.
