Showing posts with label community. Show all posts
Showing posts with label community. Show all posts

Social Nation: How to Harness the Power of Social Media to Attract Customers, Motivate Employees, and Grow Your Business Review

Social Nation: How to Harness the Power of Social Media to Attract Customers, Motivate Employees, and Grow Your Business
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Starting with a real-life and enlightening exchange with is wife, Barry Libert begins to open our eyes to how we must take advantage of everything our new Social Nation has to offer. Libert seems to have written Social Nation so that we all can save the many good things about being in charge of a small company, of being an employee of a Fortune 500 company, of being a customer of the hardware store down the street.
Libert, has managed to write a business book which is truly for any adult, be they an employer, employee, or customer. The book has an excitement to it, due to how Mr. Libert has written at a pace which makes me and others feel that this is the time to fix some of the many things that were so great about American capitalism.
Today, if we did an impromptu interview out on the street, I would bet it would be hard to find customers who felt that the places they shopped actually even knew if they were a customer; and men and women who work in all sorts of buildings and industries would tell us that they have never had a real discussion with their manager or his manager together with other employees. Many would tell us that the "suggestion box," now seen only in movies before the 1970's, has been broken and out of service for the entire time they have worked at their job.
It is true that there have been "scares" about us losing how to really communicate with each other. Think of the television, then the cell phone, and ..... Libert spins no scare tactics in Social Nation. He has the facts. He cuts to the truth. For a number of decades businesses have cared more about assets and cash on hand, "than they did people and their relationships." Well, now, with the Internet and the Web, companies, employees and their clients can regain what made capitalism in the United States so great, we were all part of it. We can be again. Companies can offer clients their own Web sites which would contain information about the products they have purchased, and, the company would offer specials directly to the customer and not through a blaring commercial. This would all be done on an opt in basis, no push advertising. The customer receives a genuine invitation to be a part of that business.
Better yet, as Social Nation points out, employees and employers can start rebuilding, or for most of us, start from scratch, the building of trust, commitment, and loyalty. Social Nation illustrates that what our kids take as just part of life, business can use to listen to employees and what they have to say, the good, the bad, the great suggestion which may be a company's best selling product the next year. All of it is possible. Just as important, the employees will feel part of something, because they are part of something. Something that Libert's Social Nation makes many of us yearn for, only now, it can be revived and made even better. That is how American business works.
At a time when many of us are looking for things to be hopeful about, Barry Libert bring us a gift of hope and of success, in Social Nation.

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It's time to join Social Nation and prosper! This book will show you, as an employee, customer or partner, how to use new social technologies, make yourself heard, and produce better products and services. As a leader and manager, you'll find out how to use these tools to harness social interactions to improve your business and to create your own social nation. The book provides a social assessment for leaders, managers and employees to scientifically evaluate your individual social skills and competencies. This book relies on well-known case studies about businesses that illustrate how social principles and strategies can help organizations to:
Integrate social skills into existing managerial and leadership practices
Overcome some of the common risks and objections that are often cited as obstacles to becoming a successful social enterprise
Adopt new forms of social leadership across the entire organization
Attain social intelligence by listening, understanding, and measuring outcomes of your investment in relationships with customers, employees and partners
Realize tangible economic benefits and ROI from new product and service offerings Social Nation provides readers with an opportunity to join the Social Nation community and share experiences with other leaders and social individuals.


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Smart Start-Ups: How Entrepreneurs and Corporations Can Profit by Starting Online Communities Review

Smart Start-Ups: How Entrepreneurs and Corporations Can Profit by Starting Online Communities
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The whole first part of the book is basically built around one idea: mobile phone based "communities" & social networks. He keeps reiterating the same point in different ways while promising to explain how to do any of the stuff he talks about in later chapters. The first hundred pages come off sounding like a commercial for the author's other chapters or other projects.
By the time you actually get to the later chapters you'll find them very weak on any substantively useful information or action steps to emulate. The whole project just seems rushed to capitalize on current Web trends and makes a hypothesis of dubious relevance.

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Praise for Smart Start-Ups"Silver's new book is a masterpiece of clarity concerning the next great entrepreneurial wave, and my only problem with it was the charley horse in my elbow I got turning the pages."-Robin Richards, founding President, MP3.com, and CEO, Notification Technologies Inc."Silver is a modern-day Prometheus. For community entrepreneurs, Smart Start-Ups contains the secrets of fire from the heavens. If you work with communities of any kind, you ignore this book at your own peril."-John Szeder, former senior game developer, Digital Chocolate, Inc., and CEO, Mofactor, Inc."Silver dives in and pulls the naked truth out of the world of online communities. There's nothing like it on the shelves. He speaks with the best and brightest in the mobile and online community markets."-Sean Malatesta, founder, Yack Media Services, and Vice President, Indiagames, Inc."Smart Start-Ups is a must-read for any aspiring Internet entrepreneur. Silver cuts right to the heart of the important fact that communities are like entire nations, but without geographic borders, and they're creating the greatest transformation since the Industrial Revolution."-Clarence Briggs, founder and CEO, AIT.com"Silver's book is an excellent, captivating, ingenious, and essential read for anyone who wants to know how to create wealth by starting an online community. One mark of a great book is that it makes you see things in a new way; Silver certainly succeeds in that respect."-Kyle E. Gillman, founder and CEO, Forgefinder, Inc.

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Frommer's 500 Places Where You Can Make a Difference Review

Frommer's 500 Places Where You Can Make a Difference
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I am not a big fan of Frommer's but the topic of this book intrigued me so I decided to give it a shot. I was a bit skeptical at the start, as a few of the first suggested activities felt more like "eco-tourism" (with the emphasis on TOURISM) than grandiose ways to save the world. Not that there is anything wrong with eco-tourism, but at least as I think of it, I see it as more the avoidance of a negative (i.e. "leave no footprint behind!") rather than the creation of a positive as this book claimed in the introductory notes was its mission. However, as I continued to read, I became more and more interested and amazed by the suggested activities, and convinced that yes indeed, these are places and actions where one really CAN make a difference in the world.
I love travel, but had never thought of doing many of things suggested in this book, largely because I had thought of them requiring a larger time commitment than most of us would consider reasonable. That is, most people can't take a year or two off to save the whales or feed the starving in India without serious negative consequences for their own life or career. As idealistic as many of us are, pragmatic constraints often come to bear. But one of the things the reader will quickly note about this book is that many of the suggested activities have a duration of a week or two, which is often a much more manageable amount of time. Many of the activities cost a good deal of money to engage in ($100+/day), which on the one hand goes to a good cause, but on the other can quickly make a large dent in ones savings given that travel to many of these locales is not cheap in itself. But many are not so expensive, and others are "free" in return for a hard day's work, meaning that one could live for several weeks or several months in an exotic locale for nothing more than the price of a plane ticket.
This book is nicely organized as well: not by location, as one might expect from a travel guide, but by theme (animal welfare, teaching children, etc.) which is helpful. If you are like me, you will find yourself naturally gravitating toward certain types of activities more than others, which means that some chapters will be more engaging that others on a personal level. Of course, this book is only a starting point, but that is the point: to raise awareness and spark the imagination. After reading this book, if you are left thinking "wouldn't it be great to do (activity X) in (country Y)?" chances are you can find a way to do this, through a short look around the internet or at the web sites of the specific organizations mentioned here even if it's not specifically mentioned in the book.
"Making a difference" is a noble cause, but it can sometimes sound too overwhelming to be attainable by the common man or woman without oodles of disposable time or money. Yet, this book provides a large number of specific ways in which making a difference really is possible. And of course, although this book focuses mostly on exotic locales, many ways of making a difference can be done right in one's own community. I went into this book slightly skeptical, but emerged thinking of ways I too could make a difference either through one of the programs mentioned in this book or through other means. Much of travel is done to benefit one's own wants and needs. This book does not criticize that perspective, but points out a way in which travel can help others as well.

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