Engaging on social media channels with customers and prospects does not a social business make. Being a social business requires this for starters, and more. Becoming social inside and out by engaging stakeholders at all levels takes consistent effort and clarity from the C-suite to the sales organization and elsewhere.
To really understand how to evolve into a social business from a social media engagement position, I recommend a book authored by Mark Fidelman called Socialized! How The Most Successful Businesses Harness The Power of Social.
I’ve only read word for word through page 40 and became too excited not to share this book for small-to-medium enterprises as well as larger corporations. Its teachings are for all types of business and that includes not-for-profits and academia, as well.
In the first several chapters of the book, my pages are marked up and dog-eared. Mark interviews the experts and authors who’ve already paved the way with tomes on each phase of the social media revolution, and he dots his writings with fodder from executive interviews and his professional experiences with Forbes as the Socialized and Mobilized columnist.
Essentially, what Mark is trying to instill among corporate executives is that social media is the here and now; it’s not going away, and it has forever altered the business landscape of yore. Executives not on board need to be…yesterday.
There are still so many companies grappling with social media, and as Mark puts it so well, “Companies that are ignoring (social media) communities will soon find their customers moving to better neighborhoods.”
Indeed!
Who Needs To Read Socialized! ?
- Anyone trying to convince a client that social media adoption has to occur, needs to read this book.
- Anyone in a marketing department having issues earning consensus throughout the organization about a social media deployment strategy, needs to read this book.
- Anyone who is a social media blogger who wants the most recent research at the tip of the finger to reference in blog fodder or in thought pieces, needs to read this book.
So What Is A Social Business?
Everyone has their own definition for their own organization; however, Mark provides a simple explanation – “businesses that have learned the philosophy and strategy of using social technologies to create more adaptive businesses.”
A benefit of being a social business, according to Mark, “provides real-time dynamic feedback from employees, customers and partners… with collaboration and social technologies that make it easy to capture, store, and share organizational intelligence.”
So many businesses today are content having a marketing team with a social media guru leading the charge. Perhaps it’s one or two people who tweet and post Facebook content or maybe it’s an external agency working on social media strategy with one person internally.
That is not what a social business is all about. Mark is clear in his writings about the necessity to have a solid team of seven various experts who manage a different aspect of social media, mobile and intelligence with an internal or external perspective.
The book dives into critical discussion about business culture, developing an internal digital village for employees, engaging externally, provides a strategic social playbook, identifies the social employee, and discusses ROI indepth.
As I continue to read every word in this book, because it is that good, I’ll be writing posts about what I’m pondering. Run and get your copy, and then we can have a healthy discussion below. The really cool news is that Mark Fidelman is everywhere. He’s accessible on Google+, Twitter, Forbes, LinkedIn, and gosh, maybe Pinterest?
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