A Business Perspective on Social Media

The secret to connecting with consumers in a fragmented, chaotic marketplace, then, lies in how businesses collaborate with customers. WIKIBRANDS: Reinventing Your Company in a Customer-Driven Marketplace (McGraw-Hill; January 2011) by Sean Moffitt and Mike Dover builds on a breakthrough, multimillion-dollar marketing research program initiated by Don Tapscott, technology guru and author of Grown Up Digital (McGraw-Hill), to deliver a state-of-the-art appraisal of the latest developments in customer engagement. Using findings from this study and hundreds of other examples, Moffitt and Dover explain how brands like Ford, Zappos, Starbucks, P&G, and other businesses large and small stopped marketing at consumers, and embraced peer-to-peer technologies to:

Engage customers via social influence, word-of-mouth, and user-generated content
Create an experience through the creation and aggregation of customer-driven ratings, reviews, and online groups
Build communities using Twitter, “crowdsourcing,” and other shared experiences
Make connections that are authentic, built on genuine trust, and enhance value by creating a network that ties a brand’s consumers as much to each other as to the brand

Part wake-up call, part action plan, WIKIBRANDS is the blueprint for how businesses are driving innovation and growth through technology-based immersive customer interaction.

– From the McGraw-Hill News Release:

A Business Perspective on Social Media

This is a transcription of a the Business901 podcast, Reinventing Your Company in a Customer-Driven Marketplace with co-author Mike Dover. Mike is Managing Partner of Socialstruct Advisory Group. As Vice President, Research Operations, for New Paradigm (Moxie Insight), he led the operations for research programs for the bestselling books Wikinomics and Grown Up Digital. He also has provided review support for more than a dozen other books.