Social Nation, by Barry Libert, purports to be a cutting-edge guide to a philosophy that, if not embraced, could be the tragic downfall of your corporation. The philosophy is that Social Media is a fast-growing space where your customers will express their needs, wants and complaints, with or without you. The author claims that businesses that build "Social Nations" and get in front of this trend have better customer (and employee) loyalty and higher profitability than those that don't or won't.
Unfortunately, this book has many problems. First and most glaring are the grammatical errors (lots of run-on sentences), typos, and typesetting errors in every chapter. On the very first page of the Preface, while the author is discussing realizations he had from his wife's job at Harvard, "faculty" is spelled "faciulty." It's hard to criticize Harvard for being a closed institution when you can't spell faculty right. In Chapter 1, there are almost as many run-on sentences as there are paragraphs. Perhaps in an attempt to compensate for this, there are also quite a few extraneous commas. This and the large, "easy-read" print made the book feel amateur at best. I would like to believe that the author is an expert in his field; unfortunately, Social Nation is a treatise that is also a marketing piece for his own marketing (social software) company; one which helps other companies build "social nations." The typos and formatting errors made it difficult for me to accept an "expert" opinion since a true professional / publisher would at least have better proofreading and editing. Just because social media can be informal - the English language isn't, and I expect much more from a hardcover book than I do a blog. Perhaps extremely ironically, the author has a section called "Don't Ignore Spelling and Grammar" in the chapter on etiquette, on p. 119. He states that what you write is a reflection of who you are, that you should use correct punctuation and spelling, and watch your grammar. By this point, I was starting to think book was written by a ghost writer who actually has a sense of humor.
The second, and most obvious problem are the various statistics and opinions cited that simply are not backed up. Tying data about companies' Social Media marketing efforts to their profitability seems like a circular argument. Companies with a smart online presence could also simply be the same companies who are already profitable and can afford PR departments with staff who monitor Twitter and create online content day in and day out. It would have been more compelling to show data that tied specific social media programs with profits that turned around, excluding all other factors (like new products, downsizing, acquisitions, or any other number of ways companies increase shareholder value). Given that isolating these variables would be difficult to do, it seemed like the author could have at least tried.
I grew even more skeptical when I read that the workplace is becoming more social because there are more women in the workplace, and women sure are social. While it's great to leverage relationship-building skills of any employee, that seemed like quite a leap. In my experience, the workplace is becoming less and less social as we battle a challenging economy, and employers demand productivity because honestly, there's someone else who wants your job. Water cooler conversations are almost a dinosaur concept and even salaried employees are micromanaged. There's almost no time for personal at work. So when the author made a leap from a Time magazine survey stating that 40 percept of women are the primary earners in their homes and that women are "on the verge" of outnumbering men, to a few paragraphs later stating that women "nearly dominate the workplace," he immediately undermined his own credibility. Women dominate the workplace, how? By the time he states that women's "personal values" (read: social skills?) are coming to work with them, implying that all that hype about Twitter is really because women love to chat and share things, I was more than a little irritated. In Part 2, Avon is cited as a company that, women and connection-driven, grows even during recessions. It is stated that while people postpone major purchases in a bad economy, women do not cut back on cosmetics. Really? Maybe it's because if you do want to spend money on cosmetics, a decision is made to support your friend or sister who has products at better prices than the chain drugstore? While I respect Avon's CEO, whose motto is "It's nice to be important, but it's far more important to be nice," and the fact that that social leadership is a key success driver for all businesses, I find that repeatedly, the author fails to explore every aspect needed to really earn credibility, and is in fact somewhat condescending.
In the chapter about "Why Social Skills Matter," I felt as though I was reading a Human Resources 101 guide to giving annual performance reviews. He outlines 4 major areas of organizational strength: Physical, Informational, Emotional, and Social. In a nutshell, that's: Hard work, Smart work, Making Connections, and knowing how to Listen. Enough said. Next there is a chapter on testing your own Social Quotient: are you an Adaptor? An Architect? A Collaborator? A Connector? A Creative thinker? Am I Transparent, a Risk Taker, or a Visionary? How about: Am I at a leadership seminar with bad buffet food? Every "type" is explored with pros and cautions listed. OK, great. What if someone is more than one type? What if I've overstaffed with too many Architects, and not enough Creatives? He doesn't even get into that.
But the book's not all bad. In fact, there are several major concepts that have a lot of potential, if the author would have carried them through with a little more care. One is that businesses need to find the social leaders in their organizations to create change and put others first. Makes sense, but this is only outlined with anecdotes and sections like "Business is Personal," where you're encouraged to bring your real personality to work. Unfortunately there is no data on why someone's ability to "manage communities" translates into bottom line value. Another solid set of concepts is that businesses should listen to their customers, take risks, create meaningful interactions, ask people what they really want, and give up control. Oh and mind your manners! Have good etiquette (because everyone is watching) and, if you can manage, some charisma (again, is this new?) and definitely don't forget to say please and thank you. If the author were to carry this concept through, he would have outlined how bad manners and poor etiquette drive away sales. There are just too many anecdotes on obvious topics that don't get fully developed, that I wonder if this book was published just to get a book published - not to say anything new.
Possibly the most solid concept is that it doesn't matter what business you are in, and that the manner in which you build a "Social Nation" can be very specific to your field. You don't have to blog or create Facebook promotions. Perhaps if you are in software publishing, open source software is the way to build your community and leverage ideas. Or take the example of corporations who gave employees their own social networks to share knowledge and ideas for efficiency, nurturing solid working relationships and a sense of community in the process. But again, there's nothing revolutionary about the fact that giving your employees and customers a voice, and hearing it, is a valuable process that can be converted into valuable assets: it's just that a lot of companies are late to the party.
It does seem obvious that businesses that hear their customers, respond quickly to complaints, and generate rapport by having executives blog regularly will increase customer confidence and loyalty. But that's just it - it's obvious. We have new tools through which companies must present a more transparent set of content and methods for customer care, and (gasp) actually trust their employees and customers to use these tools in a positive manner. I agree with the author that these tools must be leveraged. To make this book really matter as anything other than a poorly edited brochure, I would have liked to see real data about systems that created results, not situational anecdotes that sound compelling.
When the reader finally gets to the meat of things - the "how" to build your social nation, part 3 - it's a whopping 23 pages long, starting on page 187. By now you get the concept that if you have developed and nurtured friends and followers, they will create products and services for you. To get started, you need to deliver customer support via your online community (obvious). Then you build your brand through them (where's the new idea here?) Next, you do market research via this community (shouldn't that have been chapter 1?) Next, you leverage peers to train your people (sounds like a cost-saving measure), and finally you let others generate and develop your new products (while you bankroll all this value your community has generated). What? Where's the concern about intellectual property laws? Why do you own your customer's ideas - I missed that? Their suggestions, maybe, can be acted upon, but more than once in the book, the author discusses how absolutely genius it is to have people you are not paying, do your work for you. Oh and be sure to blog, enable comments, have discussion boards, take polls, and let your social nation members rate and review stuff. Then, they will become fanatics.
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