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

Social Nation describes how businesses can engage customers, employees, suppliers, and shareholders in a mutually beneficial alliance by creating a well-designed and managed portfolio of social media initiatives. This portfolio can deliver dramatic results, spurring innovation, improving product design, raising employee productivity, lifting retention rates for all stakeholders, and boosting sales and profitability. Aside from rewards, there are risks to be considered. This book gives readers practical guidance, for example warning against the temptation to engage in social media as a quick-fix marketing or public-relations gimmick. Distilling the cumulative experience of hundreds of professionals and customers, the book offers 100 concise, experience-based prescriptions to help readers consider how they can best use social media to realize their goals. Compelling case histories and anecdotes illuminate and entertain. Topics include: Create solid platforms: build a seamless, integrated community platform. The unconnected piecemeal approach can create a communications problem. Get registration right: convince community members to register and provide the personal information you need--without annoying them. Take the measure of Twitter: members of Twitter are not the captive old-media audiences of television and radio; they have to be wooed. Humanize your business. Moderate, don't censor: an online community reflects on its sponsors public image. Monitor the content it shares without censoring freedom and unpredictability.