About Social Nation
It's time to join Social Nation and prosper! This book will show you, as an employee, customer or partner, how to use new social technologies, make yourself heard, and produce better products and services.
As a leader and manager, you'll learn how to use these tools to harness social interactions to improve your business and to create your own social nation. The book provides a social assessment for leaders, managers and employees to scientifically evaluate your individual social skills and competencies. Leveraging case studies, Social Nation illustrates the principles and strategies that will help you to:
- Integrate social skills into existing leadership practices
- Overcome common objections cited as obstacles to becoming a social enterprise
- Adopt new forms of social leadership across your organization
- Attain social intelligence by listening and measuring outcomes
- Realize tangible economic benefits and ROI from business initiatives & offerings
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Q&A WITH AUTHOR BARRY LIBERT
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What are the core messages in Social Nation?
The core messages have to do with the fact that business is now personal. Companies are surviving and thriving on their connections and on their relationships with individuals, employees, customers and investors. The social norms—such as caring, sharing, putting others first—that we understand in our personal lives are becoming prevalent in the business world as well.
In order to stay viable and profitable businesses need to build their own Social Nation, or their own networks of interconnected people who will support you because you support them.
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Why did you decide to write this book?
I realized that people were confused by some of the shifts that were happening inside the business community. As social media took hold, Facebook and Twitter scared off many leaders and organizations. CEOs were reading about what their employees were eating for lunch and hearing about inane spats with boyfriends on Facebook. They couldn't see how these tools were useful for business.
Combine that with the fact that many of us grew up in an era in which we were taught that business and personal are separate. And now, business and personal are merging. Only there are rules that still apply. And one of them is that sharing useless information, just because you can and because it's easy, hasn't become acceptable.
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How did you come up with the title Social Nation?
As a Bostonian I was impressed by the energy and enthusiasm around Red Sox Nation. It doesn't matter where you're from or how many games you've actually been to, this is a strong core of friends, fans and followers that have enhanced the Red Sox franchise and its business. Red Sox Nation connects people, no matter where they are and who they are, to a shared common interest and passion.
Grateful Nation is another social community, established by Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital, that was created to connect patients and their families to other patients and families who can share medical stories and experiences. It allows people to find hope and wisdom or advice and community among strangers.
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What's the first step a company or leader should take from Social Nation?
The first step is to assess your social skills and competencies. Many of us are on the cusp of joining Social Nation but we're not quite there yet because we haven't exactly figured out what it means to be social. Working with a group of researchers and scientists we developed an online assessment that can measure social skills and aptitude. Through a series of specific questions, the test can pinpoint your social skills. Most of us like to think we're social, and maybe we are, but the likelihood is that we're giving ourselves more credit than we deserve.
The Social Aptitude Test isn't something you can fail, but rather it gives you a sense of where your strengths are, how you can improve those and how you can strengthen your other business competencies. This book is designed to help readers and business leaders overcome obstacles while growing their social business strategies and leadership. That's best accomplished if you can accurately assess where you stand today. The assessment measures social skills but all businesses and leaders have other competencies as well and the winning combination of competencies is covered in "Social Nation."
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