The NOW Revolution: Seven Social Imperatives for Business

"The NOW Revolution" written by Jay Baer and Amber Naslund has received reviews from the likes of DuctTape Marketing’s John Jantsch, Chris Brogan and Seth Godin. It outlines how you can retool your organization to make real-time business work for you rather than against you.

"You Say You Want a Revolution..."
I got a copy of the book at SXSW earlier this year and really enjoyed it. It covers seven shifts that will help you make your company faster, smarter, and more social. The book includes a lot of bonus material (videos, pdfs, podcasts and links) accessible through Microsoft Tags located throughout the book.

Full case studies in each of the shifts, chronicle success stories from Moosejaw, ThinkGeek,Autodesk, Sweet Leaf Tea, Taylor Guitars, Boingo and Martell Homebuilders. The book also contains examples from 50 additional companies, most of them small and medium-sized businesses.

That's a lot of content.

Shift Happens
As their web site notes, "the book presents seven shifts that businesses need to make to adapt to the speed, expectations, and immediacy of the social web. It’s the operational guide to building and organizing a socially-equipped business, from people to process."

The shifts discussed in the book include:

1. Engineer a New Bedrock: Without a consistent, powerful corporate culture you can’t win in real-time. -- I'll add that regardless of how we start working with clients on social media, we usually wind up focusing on internal operations before the launch.
2. Find Talent You Can Trust: Moving fast requires empowering employees to make quick, smart decisions. That impacts HR and hiring. A lot. -- This also gets back to culture. If departments like IT, HR, Customer Service, Legal and Marketing can't talk to each other readily and easily, it's going to be a tough road to journey down.
3. Organize Your Armies: How social media and social participation are organized and managed internally. -- Process is critical to ease any issues folks might have in getting started.
4. Answer the New Telephone: The art, methods, and pay-offs of meaningful social listening. -- When passionate customers interact directly with brands for the first time, it has a big impact.
5. Emphasize Response-Ability: Responding to customer inquiries on the social Web, but also moving beyond that to creating your own stories and conversations. -- If a business has identified its Social Brand, it ensures content created will resonate with customers and start conversation.
6. Build a Fire Extinguisher: How to find, judge, and solve a social media crisis. -- As much as things change, they seem to stay the same. Companies still do not prepare proactively for communication crisis...online or offline.
7. Make a Calculator: The many ways you can measure social media, and how to select and utilize the most appropriate metrics for your company. -- This usually starts with the initial planning process. Instead of focusing on what (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or another social platform), focus on why. Why are you engaging in social media? Is it connected to business goals? Success metrics up front make it much easier to measure success once the program is launched.

Jay Baer on "The NOW Revolution"
On August 24th, Jay Baer will be in Cincinnati to discuss "The NOW Revolution" at Cincinnati Social Media's monthly meeting. It'll be great to learn more about his perspective behind the book and what he's learned since it was published. Fifth Third Bank is the event sponsor. If you're interested in attending the event, registration is online at Eventbrite.

Comments

[Jon - PR Malta]

Answering to calls on social media is very much the new telephone its actually a bit more then that to be honest; more like you are responding to a conference call which includes much more people listening in. Thus answering promptly is essential as this also increases the probability of other people or customers interacting with the company and brand