SOCIALNATION

B A R R Y L I B E R T

How to harness the power of

Social Mediato attract customers, motivate employees,

& grow your business

Assess your social skills! Take the test inside.

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“Barry Libert is showing us all how to win by getting from me to we in our social world.”

—John Kosner, Senior Vice President and General Manager, ESPN Digital Media

“Social Nation is a must-read for business leaders striving to reset the rules of the game.”

—Dwayne H. Spradlin, President and Chief Executive Offi cer, InnoCentive, Inc.

“Barry Libert is a collaboration pioneer, not just as a thinker but as a practitioner who is

curating some of the most signifi cant communities in business. Read Social Nation for his

wisdom about how today’s companies can use social media for success.”

— Don Tapscott, author of fourteen books including (with Anthony Williams)MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World

P r a i s e f o r S O C I A L N A T I O N

$24.95 USA/$29.95 CAN

Harness social media connectedness and make your business personal.Join the social revolution at socialnationbook.com.

ISBN: 978-0-470-59926-6

The future of business is about building communities for customers, employees, and part-ners. Social Nation demonstrates just how important emotional and social connections are to attracting and keeping customers, motivating employees, and growing a more profi table, viable business. To build your own Social Nation, this book gives you a complete toolbox, including seven principles for creating a successful social strategy, as well as an assess-ment that helps you apply your skills and talents to today’s networked world.

Pick up Social Nation and embrace this new revolution, its innovative technologies, and the fresh revenue sources that will transform your organization.

BARRY LIBERT is the founder and CEO of Mzinga, a company that provides social software that manages two billion conversations a month for 15,000 communities on behalf of 300 well-known companies. He has coauthored four popular business books on information and social networks.

Cover Design: Howard Grossman

Author Photograph: © JeffreyMatePhoto.com

M AT T E F I N I S H

Marketing

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S O C I A L

NATION

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S O C I A L

NATIONHOW TO HARNESS THE POWER OF

SOCIAL MEDIA TO ATTRACT CUSTOMERS,

MOTIVATE EMPLOYEES, AND GROW

YOUR BUSINESS

BARRY LIBERT

John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Copyright�c 2010 by Mzinga, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

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ISBN 978-0-470-59926-6 (cloth)

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Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

Preface ix

PART 1 The Future of Businessis Social 1

1 Social Media Creates Real Value 3Connecting customers, employees, and loyal partners is

what creates real value. Ultimately, we just all want to

belong. The Seven Principles of Social Success. Work

and life become one. Business is now personal, and engagement

is what matters.

2 Why Social Skills Matter 25A new way of thinking about your strengths. Developing

social and emotional skills. Progress away from Industrial

Age and Information Age capabilities. Ford masters

physical skills. Other companies rely on social and emotional

capabilities, like TopCoder. Becoming extraordinary

requires a new way of thinking about what it takes to do so.

3 Test Your Social Skills 43How social are you? Discover your ability to make friends,

fans, and followers in business. Take a scientifically designed

online assessment. Learn which three of the most common

eight social traits you possess. Make them work for you and

your organization to create personal and business value.

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PART 2 Seven Principles for BuildingYour Social Nation 63

4 Principle 1: Develop Your Social Skills 65How Wine Library TV’s Gary Vaynerchuk engages his

audience. How Avon’s Andrea Jung relies on people

talking to people. Social leaders know how to follow;

Acknowledge the skills you lack. Cultivate new social

professionals in your organization.

5 Principle 2: Let Culture Lead the Way 85Zappos does culture like nobody does culture. Solidify

your core values by modeling them after your personal

values. Let your employees define culture. Find out

what everyone else wants. Google gets it, so people

flock to Google. Define your space in a social way.

6 Principle 3: Mind Your Onlineand Offline Manners 107It started with Emily Post. Now, Peter Post takes his

great-grandmother’s timeless social etiquette online.

Manners matter in the online world. It’s not about you.

Don’t hide bad behavior behind social media. It’s the

message that matters, not the medium.

7 Principle 4: Monitor and MeasureYour Communities’ Contributions 125Ganz Toys goes social with Webkinz. Furry critters link

the online and offline worlds while producing valuable

information. Business can collect data and know more

than ever about what really matters to us; which means

better-than-ever products and services. Understand your

communities’ sentiment and act on them.

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8 Principle 5: Involve Your Fansin Everything You Do 141Ducati makes motorcycles personal. Social strategies

complement traditional marketing. Online communities

let bikers connect, share, and organize. Your customers

can propel you forward. Community-centered initiatives

produce value. Know your audience and meet their needs.

9 Principle 6: Rely on Your Community forGrowth and Innovation 159Soda becomes social. PepsiCo turns Mountain Dew

over to loyal drinkers for innovative ideas. The crowd drives

the product’s evolution. Open innovation enhances

creativity, progress, and speed to market. You can have the

best R&D team but you still need input from others.

10 Principle 7: Reward Others and YouWill Be Rewarded, Too 171Anyone can develop applications for Apple. You get

what you want and you get paid to do it. Financial rewards

are only part of the equation. Emotional rewards are more

in demand now than ever before. Business has to appeal to

both our wallets and hearts.

PART 3 Start Today to Create YourOwn Social Nation 183

11 How to Get Started and 10 Pitfalls to Avoid 185Know the difference between friends and followers and

fans and fanatics. 5 places to get started. You don’t

need to perfect your social skills or strategies to get started.

Start small. See obstacles as opportunities. Taking the plunge

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takes courage but pays off. Avoid the top 10 errors of going

social.

EPILOGUE: Business and Social Become One 211Creating a great family is like building a successful

business. Set simple, clear principles. Offer guidelines;

don’t make demands. Let others interpret the guidelines

to create greatness. Don’t waste any more time.

Join the Social Nation and benefit.

Acknowledgments 221

Mzinga Writing Team 225

Company Index 229

Subject Index 231

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Preface

You make a living by what you get. You makea life by what you give.

—Winston Churchill

About 15 years ago my wife, Ellen, started askingme, ‘‘Why don’t businesses get it?’’ She would comehome from work, sit across the dinner table from me,and say, ‘‘Why don’t they understand thatorganizations depend more on their communities, nottheir products and services, for enduring success?’’At the time, she was the dean of students at HarvardDental School and was troubled by the fact thatstudents were not viewed as a community ofcontributors that could help reinvent the school,curriculum or fund raising activities.

‘‘At Harvard, they spend a lot of time talking abouthow much money they have under management,’’Ellen would tell me. ‘‘They talk about how manybuildings they own. They talk about the number oftenured faciulty, their research grants, and almosteverything except the community of students andtheir interactions.

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Ever since she said that to me, I’vepaid close attention to howorganizations operate and what theyreally manage and measure—revenues from products and servicesversus information from customerand employee communities and theirinteractions. And the bottom line isthat I realized Ellen was right.

Businesses cared more about assets and money,than they did people and their relationships. Theycouldn’t remember the names of their customers andemployees and didn’t seem interested in creatingfriends with their constituents. They didn’t treat thesepeople as loyal fans, great friends, or true followers.Business weren’t realizing the value they couldactually generate with their help if they viewed themin this context. Simply put, I realized that businessesweren’t living up to the age-old promise of putting thecustomer first. Further, companies and organizationsweren’t treating employees as the most importantassets for driving growth.

Take Facebook, which was started at Harvard by aHarvard student to serve and connect the studentcommunity there. Although the students attendedHarvard, theuniversity didn’tvalue the power ofthe social networksthat were beingcreated on campus.As a result, Harvardmissed theopportunity to notonly help their

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students benefit from the friends and communitiesthat were being created but also didn’t help fosterdeep, ongoing relationships with those studentsnetworks post graduation.

In short, the result is that more than $10 billion ofFacebook value was conceived at Harvard, by aHarvard student, to serve the Harvard studentcommunity (initially). Ultimately, the universitymissed out on fulfilling the students’ needs and theeconomic benefit that followed. In fact, Harvard haslittle to do with a business that more than 500 millionpeople today actively call their own personal nation.

Yet Harvard continues to say that its most importantassets are its people (students, faculty, and donors),all the while doing little to foster their community usingtoday’s social technologies. Until recently, they didn’teven understand that building their own on-linecommunities for their students and their parents,alumni, employees (including faculty), partners, andbenefactors was critical to their future vitality.

I think I know why.

SEEN BUT NOT HEARD

Growing up, my parents, like many parents 50 yearsago, taught me and my siblings that children shouldbe ‘‘seen and not heard.’’ Consequently, we satsilently at the dinner table each night listening toour parents. Night after night we basically learnedthat we were to live according to their beliefs andrules. They were in charge and we were not. Themessage was loud and clear.

My parents were no different from most parents ofthat generation in believing children were supposedto listen, follow orders, and do as they were told. The

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same was true for school. Teachers taught and thestudents were supposed to do little more than listen.

So, no surprise that this attitude has beentranslated into today’s business world. Most oftoday’s leaders were raised by parents who weresimilar to mine. Consequently, the clear reality ofbusiness today is that leaders believe they shouldlead, managers manage, and employees aresupposed to follow. Essentially, employees aresupposed to be seen, not heard.

In addition, business leaders haven’t treatedcustomers much differently. They tell them what todo: ‘‘Buy our products and services—and don’tbother giving us feedback about what you’ve justbought, because we’re too busy.’’ Examples of thisattitude are everywhere. Companies haven’t takenus very seriously. As proof, they route our calls forsupport through automated systems, giving us littleor no ability to reach a human. They haven’ttraditionally asked for or incorporated our feedbackin their products or services. Instead, they tend tobelieve that they know best what we want.

Finally, they haven’t modified their marketing andadvertising programs to meet our needs. Instead, theybroadcast what they have to sell the old-fashionedway, by bombarding us with their newest campaignson TV, radio and in print, rather than engaging us in atwo-way conversation. Clearly, if organizations thoughtabout us as friends and followers, let alone fans, this isnot the way they would conduct themselves.

HARVARD ISN’T ALONE

In the early 1990s, as my wife was just beginningto sound the ‘‘social alarm,’’ I was working at

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John Hancock, as a managing director in thefirm’s real estate department. Every day, I wouldride up and down the elevators in one of thetallest buildings in Boston, past all the otherfloors. When I happened to ride the elevators withvarious Hancock executives, I would ask a fewbasic questions: ‘‘Who leases from us? What canwe learn from all the people who work on eachfloor? How can we learn from them about what weshould do to make our services better and morecomprehensive?’’

My questions generally would be met with blankstares. Nevertheless, I kept asking the questions.‘‘We should be talking to these people, asking themwhat they want and how we can deliver it to them,’’ Ikept insisting. Sadly, however, I was the odd manout. ‘‘They are our tenants,’’ I was told. ‘‘We aretheir landlord. They just rent space from us’’

The Hancock executives reminded me of myparents because they thought tenants should beseen and notheard. They mayhave used differentwords, but themessage was thesame. Theexecutivesbelieved ourtenants shouldoccupy thebuilding on our terms, and therefore we didn’t needto care about what they were doing or how they weredoing other than provide space. As a result, Hancockfailed to seize the opportunity to build a tenantnation—or a nation of residents, office occupants

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and retailers in which all of our tenants needs weremet—and they became our loyal fans and followers.

I decided I couldn’t stay in real estate. It was tooinhuman an industry for me. I wanted to hear frompeople, not just lease them space in buildings. I trulywanted to understand their wants and needs, andgive them a voice. More importantly, I wanted tounderstand how I could change what I was doing,based, at least in part, on their input. Finally, Ibelieved that if businesses could convert customersand employees into friends, fans, and followers, realvalue could be created.

As a result of these experiences, in 1997, Iproposed to write a book calledMy Wife Is Right,formulated on Ellen’s simple premise thatcompanies should focus increasingly on people, andtheir wants and needs—especially their emotionalneeds—and less on products and services. Theyshould pay greater attention to the processes thatmade their communities of people feel important.Further more, I had been noticing, that withglobalization, all products and services werebecoming commoditized over time, and that the onlyenduring source of value for businesses was theircommunities of people.

With all this as background, I was becomingconsumed with how little businesses knew aboutthe social and networking aspects of theiremployees’ and customers’ lives. They definitelyweren’t paying attention to all of the relationships(friends, families, other connections) that wereattached to the customers they served, and who,in turn, served them (employees). I saw clearlythat each connection was an invitation to makeanother connection and form another relationship.

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But businesses and their leaders didn’t seem toget it.

Silly me. I thought I could actually write a bookabout my wife’s observations. But publishers said,‘‘No way.’’ I was told that no one would read a bookabout some man’s wife being right, or about howcompanies were the sum total of their communityrelationships. I was told that no one wanted to hearhow leaders had to become more emotive and putother people and relationships first if they wanted toprosper. I was told to forget about it.

But I couldn’t.

ALIGNING WITH MY CHILDREN

Around this time I was also paying attention to thechanges in technology and communication as Iwatched my two sons grow up. When our childrenentered middle school, I realized that I wanted to bepart of their lives. I wanted to spend less time on theroad for work and more time at home. I wanted acareer that would allow me to ‘‘travel’’ with my sonsalong their journey. More importantly, I wanted to beable do it according to their schedule, on their terms.In other words, I wanted to be with them when theywoke up in the morning, go to work only after theyhad gone to school, attend their afternoon sports andextracurricular activities, eat dinner with them, andthen go back to work when they were doing theirhomework. Finally, I wanted to become familiar withthe technologies my kids were using tocommunicate with their peers so that I couldcommunicate with them using the same tools. Inessence, I wanted to live a life that aligned with theirlives, and communicate in their words, while using

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their technologies in order to create our own familynation.

KAYAK.COM PURSUES A NEW WAY OF WORKING

Today, I’m hardly alone in wanting to connect myfamily and my business—on new, more social terms.Paul English, co-founder of Kayak.com, the travelsearch engine, has built into his day a very importantritual. He drives his 14-year-old son to school almostevery single day. He schedules meetings andbusiness travel around this simple yet importantpractice, and you can be sure that 20 years from nowmuch of what binds them together will be memoriesfrom those early-morning car rides.

English conducts meetings at other people’sdesks. He goes to them. He sits with the productmanagers; he wantseveryone to contribute,to add to the discussion.He also answers thecustomer support linepersonally, because hewants to hear directlyfrom the people he’sserving. He wants themto know him, and hewants to know them. He had a bright red phoneinstalled in the middle of the engineering departmentthat rings when a customer service call is coming in.Not only does he expect his engineers to answer thephone and solve problems, but he does the same.

In all these ways, English puts himself in themiddle of his community. He demonstrates that he’sgot his sleeves rolled up and is ready to work for his

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fans and followers. He leads by example. Like otherleaders and companies that are joining the SocialNation, English understands that people want to betreated like individuals, not statistics. Heunderstands customers count and humanconnections matter even more to Kayak’s future.

MY FIRST SOCIAL NATION

Much like English, I realized that there was a way toconnect the two parts of my life and build a companybased on creating on-line communities. In June2001, long before Facebook had even beenconceived, I joined a start-up, financed by a Chicago-based private equity firm, to build online communitysoftware and service offerings for companies. Thecompany had 20 customers and 9 employees, and itspremise was simple: We were going to use the Weband telephones to enable call-center executives toshare directly with one another what worked andwhat didn’t. Our offerings were equally simple: Weorganized weekly and monthly Web conferences,captured our member’s conversations andsynthesized their insights, then made them availableon-line for our members to hear and use in their dailyactivities.

How did this early approach to nation buildingcome about? This Chicago-based investor hadembraced the idea that people had an absolute rightto ‘‘be seen and heard.’’ Further, they believed thatall their interactions could and should be capturedand made available to members to help them andtheir organizations make better decisions, fasterbased on the experiences of others. We named theorganization—the Customer Care Strategy Forum

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(CCSF), and its mission was the sharing of personaland professional experiences so that everyone in thecommunity could benefit from each other.

CCSF morphed into Mzinga over time. Swahili for‘‘beehive,’’ Mzinga was named to capture the notionof combining collaboration and individual actions tocreate a socially successful organization. Mzinga isnow located in Waltham, Massachusetts, a townabout 15 miles outside Boston. Its mission is still toallow everyone to be seen and heard in the businessworld—employees, customers, partners, andinvestors, alike. We do this so that organizations cancreate friends, fans, and followers, the way Facebookhas done for us in our personal lives so that they canlearn from their communities of followers.

Our focus at Mzinga is on helping businesses buildtheir connections with their employees andcustomers to build their own Social Nations. Anotherimportant goal at Mzinga is to convert theconversations of those friends, fans, and followersinto actionable insights so that companies canbenefit from the input of their customers andemployees. Finally, we work hard to give customersand employees a voice in the design and direction ofthe companies they buy from and work for toenhance their loyalty.

To make that happen, we provide the socialstrategies, software, services, and analytic toolsthat organizations need so they can effectively listento and hear their employees and customersfeedback, while learning from their onlineinteractions and communications. Currently, wemanage and facilitate nearly 2 billion conversationsa month, in more than 15,000 online communities,for more than 250 companies. In short, helping

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companies create friends, fans, and followers in on-line communities is what we do for a living. Throughthat process, businesses—and their leaders—findnew ways to create value.

WHY READ THIS BOOK?

This book was written to help you and other membersof your team, gain three critical capabilities:

1. Assess and learn about your social skills—a criti-cal requirement in today’s networked world;

2. Benefit from the 7 rules for building your ownnation of fans, friends, and followers using socialmedia so that you can create a community thatcares about your organization and wants to helpyou grow and innovate; and

3. Provide you the steps to get started including the10 pitfalls to avoid.

Over the last nine years, I have experienced di-rectly and qualitatively the value of the social revolu-tion, in the form of happier, more involved customersand employees; improved products and services;greater revenues and higher profits; and better inves-tor relations. This book will help you master the prin-ciples for social success as it shows you how toavoid the pitfalls along the journey of refocusing yourcompany on your future—your community, theirinsights and contributions.

Enjoy the read, then join the community of readerslike yourself to discuss what works and whatdoesn’t. Become a part of the conversationsurrounding today’s Social Revolution, at www.socialnationbook.com. I look forward to hearingyour thoughts—and so will others. See you there.

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PART01 06/17/2010 Page 1

PART1THE FUTURE OF

BUSINESS IS SOCIAL

The trouble with most of us is that we knowtoo much that ain’t so.

—Mark Twain

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1SOCIAL MEDIA CREATESREAL VALUE

‘‘. . . dependence is the paradigm of you—youtake care of me; you come through for me; youdidn’t come through; I blame you for theresults. Independence is the paradigm of I—Ican do it; I am responsible; I am self-reliant; Ican choose. Interdependence is the paradigmof we—we can do it; we can cooperate; wecan combine our talents and abilities andcreate something greater together.’’

—Stephen Covey

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