While at OMS and SES Accelerator this week, I bumped into (literally) my friend Jay Baer who has just published a new book with co-author Amber Naslund called The Now Revolution. I am reading it now and may do a full review, but I asked Jay about a few core principles or shifts from the book that I think are essential for helping organizations transform.
The first deals with the notion of companies “doing social” vs. “being social”. Having personally provided social media marketing advice to a variety of companies ranging from startups to a $100 billion corporation, questions often center around “How do we do social media right?”. In other words, social media and the social web are viewed as a tactic.
Jay talks about social media and organizations as more about behavior, not tactics. I agree with him in the sense that when companies want to understand the paradigm of social media and business, it’s more about how the business behaves vs. executing certain tactics for the sake of marketing of communications. Check out the video:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqE3s4YjNho[/youtube]
We also talk about how strategic social media consulting and transformation to social business taps deeply into organizational development and social psychology. Social media consultants must be change agent if they are to affect and inspire the social fabric of how an organization behaves.
The C-Suite often looks at social media and thinks about a way to win more business and market share by implementing marketing programs. What many executives will soon realize is that the shift in how customers are engaging brands and each other will require companies to adopt social technologies and practices within their organization as a whole – to become a social business. That’s no small feat, but companies with vision can begin to roadmap and initiate those changes starting with the advice from books like The Now Revolution.
