Get Social Social Media Strategy and Tactics for Leaders, reviewed

By @SimonCocking, review of Get Social Social Media Strategy and Tactics for Leaders, by Michelle Carvill, available from Kogan here.

Business leaders’ audiences – their customers, competitors and employees alike – live and breathe social media. In our hyperconnected culture, social media is the glue that allows us to stay connected to communities, products and brands. If your customers are on social media, along with your competition, then shouldn’t you be there too? Get Social untangles the social media folklore and gets to the point of how business leaders and aspiring leaders can personally use social media to get real business results. Leaders who use social media platforms right have been shown to be more connected to their customers and employees, they gather major market research advantage by being part of the social conversation and they embody their brand message thus connecting with people on an authentic level.

This is a timely and logical book. The days of having an online and offline separate persona are already long gone. Yes it’s true that not everyone operates in this way, but think about how you look to assess more about what you think about someone, something, a brand, a product, a company – you research it online. Therefore if you are not there, then you are losing out, plain and simple. The book is well written, follows a logical progression and offers up a lot of good advice and insights. The one area that perhaps let it down a little was the relative blandness of the answers in the final interview section of various CEOs interviewed for the book. In many ways, unintentionally several of the interviews and their responses actually demonstrated how important it is to be genuine, interesting and insightful. And those that are really shine through. It becomes very quick to assess who actually has something interesting to say, and who does not. Of course this may then discourage some people to ‘go social’ but conversely it is therefore a democratic and Darwinian space, where those who ‘get it’ become valued and listened to thought leaders. No one is saying it is easy to ‘Get social’ well, but this book is a useful and thought provoking addition to a rapidly evolving area of business life.

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