This week I continued reading the book âThe Social Organizationâ by Anthony J. Bradley and Mark P. McDonald. I progressed through reading chapters 3-5 and soaking in the knowledge presented. While the first two chapters of the book were informational and helped established ground work, I found that chapters 3-5 were the chapters that really started to get more in-depth with social media for business.
Chapter 3 discussed how to become a social organization. Integrating social media into a companyâs strategy and operations can be a difficult process to begin and succeed with, mostly because they do now know how the process works. Well, chapter 3 lays out a great roadmap on this process, showing that is is a constant interchange of vision, purpose, and adaptation. You need to have a vision of what you want to do and that needs to influence your purpose, but the purpose also needs to influence the vision. Then, you need to see how your organization adapts to social media and the vision and purpose, and change the vision and purpose accordingly. Additionally, once you have implemented social media, there is another flowing circle of launching, guiding, and refining the social media to always make sure you are getting the most out of it.
Chapter 4 goes more in-depth on some of the ideas discussed in chapter 3, specifically how to formulate a vision for community collaboration in social media. The book discusses how, when establishing this vision, you need to figure out when/where/how social media is and is not appropriate. There are going to be certain settings and situations for an organization where it is better to stay away from social media and where it is better to utilize it, and figuring out what that is for your organization is important. Additionally, you need to figure out where the value in social media is for your company. Where are you going to get the most out of it and where will it hurt you? These questions have to be asked on a company-by-company basis and thus no one correct answer is available, but they are important questions for companies to discuss when becoming more social.
Lastly, chapter 5 again touches on information presented in chapter 3 and discusses how to develop a strategic approach to community collaboration. This strategy is also known as the purpose. A purpose is important to a company as it becomes more social because it helps attract people to the social media. When forming a purpose, you have to consider a target audience, what they want to get out of it, and what the value of the social media is. One of the biggest ideas discussed in chapter 5 is that of the âNo, Go, Growâ model for community collaboration. The No Stage is when you figure out how suitable the social media is for community collaboration. If after assessing the media you realize it needs more work, you refine your purpose and start over again. Passing the No Stage, you reach the Go Stage. Here you push the social media and figure out if it is able to sustain community efforts, if it is, you push for even more, enabling them to collaborate further. Lastly is the Grow Stage, where you figure out how to grow the social media for a business purpose, evaluating the value and investment strategy for the media.
Overall, these three chapters were extremely informational and provided a lot of insight into starting to become a more social organization. I am excited to see what comes next and to apply what I have learned to my client as I progress through the client project.
