“Enterprise Social Technology” Book Review

“Enterprise Social Technology” is a book that flew under the radar in 2011.

The book aims to be “a how-to manual that will teach you a process for implementing social technology in its most powerful form.”

It wants to give you and your organization a leg up on leveraging social media, social networking and social relevance to change how your business operates and give you a leg up on the competition.

And I genuinely feel like it does just that. There’s 12 steps (chapters) in the book and I’m confident that if you read and take action on each step your organization will be more social and better off as a result.

Here are some things I especially appreciated:

• The emphasis on ensuring social tech goals are intertwined with your organizations’ overall goals and that social tech isn’t a magic bullet
• Building a cross-discipline team approach and ensuring each team member has specific responsibilities they’re held accountable for
• The notion that policy documents should be updated every 6 months or so in such a fast-paced and fluid environment
• Embedding sales professionals into online communities where socially facilitated selling can enhance a company’s profitability
• Establishing measurement baselines, measuring results and then comparing results to overall business objectives while continuously adapting accordingly. I also like the idea of creating and sharing a metrics dashboard organization-wide.
• The importance of pilot projects and the application of consequential thinking during the development of said projects
• The “key points” at the end of each chapter. This makes it very easy to go back and review the over-arching points when you actively try to implement the book’s advice.
• A fair amount of relevant case studies littered throughout.

And a few things I didn’t love:

• The fact that this book was crowd-sourced (different authors wrote each chapter) likely ensured that the book got finished quicker than an ordinary one-author book and it enabled the reader to get some different perspectives from various professionals. However, I do think at times it hurt the continuity of the book, created a bit overlap (not to be confused with reinforcement of key ideas) and some chapters were definitely stronger than others.
• I believe that there are some limitations to crowd-sourcing, especially for bigger companies and organizations and I wish some of those concerns would’ve been disputed or at least mentioned.
• The ROI chapter had some solid takeaways (see above), but not all measurement is ROI and I think the author of that chapter could’ve benefited from Olivier Blanchard’s Basics of Social Media ROI presentation.

Bottom Line: An underrated guidebook for implementing social technology in your organization and a resource that you can come back to after the initial reading.