As someone who is always interested at how social technologies can be harnessed for business and enterprise use, I can’t recommend Scott Klososky’s new book “Enterprise Social Technology: Helping Organizations Harness the Power of Social Media, Social Networking, Social Relevance” quite enough.
Unlike many of books out there, this book doesn’t attempt to preach and tout the wonderful goodness of social technologies and how they can help companies revolutionize they approach their businesses. Klososky assumes that the reader is already interested – you did pick up the book after all! – and instead delves into the whats and hows instead of the whys.
The book is structured around various themes that any company looking to harness social media for enterprise purposes need to be concerned about, such as assembling the right talent for your social tech team, setting correct measurement goals, managing your online reputation, as well as highlighting various social technology tools that you can explore. What’s of note is that the book also delves into how you can integrate social media usage into your company’s sales process, highlighting the two concepts of socially facilitated selling, and socially directed buying. This is especially useful since most companies understand how to incorporate social media into their communications and marketing strategies, but many have absolutely no clue of how to implement these technologies into their sales operations.
And for those who are coming in enterprise social technology blind, the book offers an actionable 12-step process that makes your life that much easier.
The story in the making of the book practices what it preaches. Much of the material that has gone into the book, such as its cover design, most of the content, and even publicity, is actually crowdsourced. Klososky – who’s founded numerous companies such as Paragraphy and Webcasts.com (that were sold for more than US$200 million in aggregate) – provided a detailed outline of the content of this book project and then leveraged crowdSPRING.com (which we reviewed here) to find writers to flesh it all out. Such a cool idea!
To find out more about this book, you can check out its website, or this flash animation.
If you’ve found this book useful, you may also want to check out Charlene Li’s “Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead” (reviewed here), or Susan Gunelius’ “30-Minute Social Media Marketing“.
