From the Inside Flap
Everywhere explains how to put your digital strategy at the center of your organization. Social media taps into the collective intelligence of people who are already actively engaged with your company. It sounds an early alarm on trends, issues with your products, and ideas for improvements. Social media allows you to engage honestly and openly with stakeholders in a way that your competitors aren't.
Internally, social media tools can foster conversations among employees, enhance strategy execution, and turn silo thinkers into bridge thinkers. Product development can take dramatic leaps through the use of proactive and vocal consumers, cross-functional collaboration, innovation brokers, and partnerships. Information that used to take a year to gather can now be sourced and fed into strategy almost instantaneously. Everywhere gives you the information you need to:
- Determine who your most valuable constituencies are, find them on the Web, and monitor them without invading their sense of privacy
- Understand how the social web has changed the consumer purchase journey
- Decide who should represent your company online and what type of internal infrastructure is needed to maximize the value of these external communities
- Look at reporting structures, company policies, and procedures to determine what helps and what hinders collaboration internally and externally
- Discover social tools that can improve communication between employees
- Learn how social media engagement is changing talent recruitment, training, and retention
Social media engagement improves companies, empowers employees, and wins customers. It creates highly efficient enterprises, able to reallocate inventory, capital, and talent on a real-time rather than quarterly basis. The social media age is upon us. Implement your digital strategy now, and your company will thrive in this new reality.
From the Back Cover
"Larry Weber clearly grasps the impact of ubiquitous social technology on companies—the unprecedented opportunities as well as the challenges. Companies that understand this new reality, and are building a comprehensive digital strategy to benefit from it, are already differentiating themselves from their peers. Take advantage of his foresight to make sure that your company is capitalizing on this new source of competitive advantage."
—Dr. JAMES CASH, Emeritus James E. Robison Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
"Everywhere is a leader's guide to creating—and getting—value from social media. Larry Weber understands the media and message of connectedness."
—ELLIOT SCHRAGE, Vice President of Global Communications,Marketing and Public Policy, Facebook
"Ongoing dialogue with customers, employees, and other stakeholders will soon be the way every successful company does business. We'll come in to work and turn on the lights, turn on the heat, and turn on the voice of our customers. In Everywhere, Larry Weber has written another visionary book, making a compelling case for the type of collaborative company that will have true competitive advantage in the future."
—DIANE HESSAN, President and CEO, Communispace
"Once again, Larry Weber takes the highly complex and dynamic digital world and gives a useful and practical guide for making it become an important part of your business . . . as it should be. As we all encounter the many impacts that digital media, social networking, and digital communities are having on our businesses, make sure you access his keen thinking."
—MARK NUNNELLY, Managing Director, Bain Capital
"Weber really gets that social media is a lot more than a set of tools that people use to chat with their friends and family. Those conversations are valuable sources of market intelligence, inputs into product and service development, and sources of employee recruitment—and, ultimately, lead to competitive advantage. At TripAdvisor, we live and breathe this stuff, as social media has been the foundation of the company. Everywhere is a must-read for business."
—STEPHEN KAUFER, founder, President, and CEO, TripAdvisor
