BE HYPER-SOCIAL. GET HYPER-SUCCESSFUL. "A thought-provoking read and a comprehensive introduction to today's business challenges as social media and social networking become increasingly vital to success. . . . Highly recommended." -- Choice magazine "If you want to really understand what makes some online communities thrive while others shrivel and fade, you have come to the right place. Francois Gossieaux and Ed Moran understand just what makes us all so social―as customers, as employees, and as business partners―both online and off." -- David Rogers, executive director, Columbia Business School Center on Global Brand Leadership, author of The Network Is Your Customer " The Hyper-Social Organization is not simply a guide to navigate through the fundamental and far-reaching transformations of today caused by social media, but it also provides insight into how to optimize and profit from it." -- Mark Yolton, senior vice president, SAP "To the extent that we can be 'human' with what we know―and share it as freely as we possibly can―we'll go a long way toward fostering a deeper level of trust with consumers. The Hyper-Social Organization not only explains why that happens--it also provides a road map for how to embed it in all your customer-facing processes." -- Barry Judge, CMO, Best Buy "Rather than getting hung up on the 'media' side of social media, Gossieaux and Moran have figured out that the real killer app is the ability to create a 1:1 communication between your customers and your brand." -- Marty St. George, CMO, JetBlue "With this book's simple yet profound prescriptions for all parts of the organization, Francois Gossieaux and Ed Moran have distilled the chaos, excitement, and fear business is feeling from a world gone social into an elegant framework of understanding. (And I’m buying books for my whole tribe.)" -- Janet Swaysland, SVP of Social Media, Monster.com About the Facebook. Twitter. YouTube. LinkedIn. Unless you're living in the Stone Age, it's hard to ignore all the social networking tools that have taken the world by storm. To keep up--and stay competitive--you need to rethink how your organization interacts with this brave new world. You need to stop marketing to consumers and start socializing with communities who know what they like and aren't afraid to share it. You need to understand the power of social media―and use it to your best advantage. You need The Hyper-Social Organization . Based on the famous "Tribalization of Business Study"--a wide-ranging annual survey conducted by Francois Gossieaux of Beeline Labs and Ed Moran of Deloitte--this is the definitive guide to using social media for organizational success. The book's surprising findings and in-depth interviews will challenge everything you know about corporate-consumer relations―starting with The 5 Steps to Being
Up to date advice on how consumers are changing due to to leverage social media / social business software, and how it will transform the office.
Before reading this book, you should already have read "groundswell" and "empowered", two books that cover the idea that social media will transform the way that customers communicate with companies. Gossieaux and Moran take this a step further and teach how one might leverage this throughout the organization. We all will have to learn this eventually.
The book starts with a simple explanation: "Human 1.0" is the way that people have interacted and worked together for thousands of years. Only recently (the last few decades) information technology has forced people into working in much more constrained ways. Mass media brought the rise of companies that communicated with the masses through a corporate voice which has had the advantage in telling people what they want and what they can have. Social media flips the mode, and brings us back to communicating one-on-one. This is not a new way of working, it is actually the original way that people worked, it is just that social media allow this to happen on a scale never before contemplated. A Hyper-Social organization is a return to the natural way of interacting, which is why the authors make a compelling argument that it is inevitable.
They give four pillars of hyper-social society
(1) Forget market segments. These were just constructs to allow corporations to coordinate their approach to the market. Instead, you need to think about tribes and humans. A tribe is a group that identifies in some way with each other, and will be the most important way of influencing purchasing patterns. Identifying tribes is the secret to success. (2) Forget company centricity, and think human centricity. Hyper-social organization can be more personal at all levels, and engage customers to focus on and satisfy their needs directly. (3) Forget information channels, and think about knowledge networks. Companies could prepare mass market messages to push through well known channels such as media and events. This communication was the only option that the consumer had, and corporations could control what the public knows. But in a social world the customer already has contacts to other members of the tribe, already is finding out accurate information about your products from others online. Pushing a company line will not work. Instead, share knowledge well, and work to gain trust. (4) Forget process and hierarchies, and embrace social messiness. They recommend something they call SEAMS: sensing, engaging, activating, measuring, and storytelling. The processes will be less and less pre-defined, but embrace that, and allow people in the organization to interact as humans.
The second half talks about strategies for adoption, and pitfalls to avoid. As you can imagine, there are serious barriers in a traditional organization to make this kind of change. For example, they show that the sales pipeline funnel strategy is fundamentally broken. So ditch it. Instead focus on word of mouth and engaging the customer through interaction. There is advice on how to gauge communities (tribes) and realise that the most important people, those making referrals, may not themselves be making a lot of purchases. Figure out how to support an leverage those people who are most important, and who may not be the ones who are the chattiest.
Here is a quote that should give you a feeling for the book:
"The sales function is one of the most studied, dissected, and carefully managed parts of the corporate machine. ... Curiously absent, however, has been a strong focus on how people purchase in groups; for most of recent history, sales has been a one-on-one game."
Sales considers a consumer in isolation, but it is time to think about how consumers impact and influence other consumers that they identify with. The book is full of good insight like this, and gives pragmatic advice on how to react to the coming changes.
Gossieaux and Moran come from marketing background, and get a lot of information from an organization for CMOs. Social Media is a large part of their focus, but there is also information about how to leverage Social Business Software. However, this book is NOT about technology; instead it is about patterns of behavior of the humans that will be your customers, and how to engage them in a world where they hold as many cards as you do.
If you realize that there is a big fundamental shift in the way that business works, then this book is an important read to prepare and adapt for the inevitable.
A shift from more traditional views of marketing, innovation, organisation structure to account for a "hyper-social" reality relationships and communities take centrestage again. The discussion had a tendency of getting repetitive and slow.
This is a topical book about the ways which business is having to adapt to a world in which 'tribes' or collaborative communities, both within and across companies and their customers, control the agenda. The authors, Gossieaux and Moran, believe that tribes form around shared passions, pains, sense of duty and traits. The impact is potentially huge in terms of the types of leaders, the shape and structure of organizations and relationships with consumers that will be required. The book focuses in particular on four pillars that act as a framework to describe the new ways of thinking: tribe (not market segment), human-centricity (not company), networks (not channel ) and social messiness (not process and hierarchy). Lots of company examples are given too so, putting aside the excessive pleonasm and occasionally hyperbolic nature of the writing, it's a useful combination of ideas and practices.
This book was okay, albeit a little repetitive, especially towards the end. The impression one gets when reading it is that the authors had a good idea, perhaps had a study and/or seminar built around this material, and then had to flesh out and write a book based on the same material, most likely very laboriously and painstakingly. If some of the repetitions were edited out, the book would read quicker and better, thereby augmenting a reader's enjoyment of the title. Nonetheless, there is a decent amount of interesting material in The Hyper-Social Organization, and it provides enough information to give readers a solid foundation on which to build further knowledge and research--certain thoughts and ideas that can be developed into whole strategies.
Engagement is the first step of social and most managers Do Not Get Engagement. Everything worthwhile about social flows from there. This book does a great job of explaining what social is and what it is not. If someone is trying to sell you on social, this book can help you determine whether or not it is the real thing.