Francois Gossieaux - The hyper-social organization eclipse your competition by leveraging social media

ECLIPSE YOUR COMPETITION BY LEVERAGING SOCIAL MEDIA

FRANCOIS GOSSIEAUX
EDWARD K. MORAN

Copyright 2010 by Francois Gossieaux and Edward K. Moran. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978-0-07-174118-7
MHID 0-07-174118-6

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To my late mother, Antoinette Verelst Gossieaux, the first love of my life.

Francois

To my smallest, but most favorite tribe: Janet, Kelly, Eddie, Kate, and Grace.

Ed

In the 1990s, with the advent of the Internet, there was a lot of buzz about how revolutionary the Internet was going to be. In my own field, marketing, everyone was thrilled about the possibility of selling things directly to consumers online, in a disinter-mediated fashion. E-commerce was the name of the game. And added to e-commerce were online advertising, Webvertising, and pay-for-content as the other big deals. Each was enthusiastically marketed as the Big Internet Revolution.

But time has proved these proclamations of business revolution to be wrong.

Although the ability of organizations to reach out to consumers in new ways has been extremely important, and has altered the way in which business has been done over the last decade, they really werent all that revolutionary in their execution or implications.

Activated by the burgeoning Internet, however, there was another revolution brewing. Drawing upon the Situationist philosophers for inspiration, the great Sufi anarchist poet Hakim Bey wrote in 1994, Meeting face-to-face is already the revolution.

Little did Bey seem to suspect that the Internet would bring some of the powerfully subversive social forces that arise when people gather away from their institutionalized circumstances into the homes of the mainstream. From where we stand today, it looks as if the bigger Internet revolution was not so much about organizations stretching out to reach consumers in new ways, but about consumers using the Internet to reach out and connect with one another in new, and endlessly increasing, ways.

Technologically facilitated social connection is the big revolution, the social movement, the transformation of our times. And yet, given that this is such an enormous change, we have a relative paucity of understanding of it.

Thats where the book you are holding in your hands comes in. Revolutionary times call for revolutionary thinking. What Francois Gossieaux and Edward K. Moran have written in this book is nothing less than a guidebook to this new revolution, an initial charting of this new terrain. More than that, it is an action plan that not only enlightens managers and everyone else about what to do in these exciting, ridiculously scary new times of transition, but why to do it.

And that explanation makes a big difference.

I realize that there is no shortage of books about the Internet or about new technology and business. Over the last 20 years, I have read literally hundreds of them. I have stacks of what I tend to quickly dismiss as shallow pop business management books. You know the ones. Some of them are filled with examples, but there is no connection between the examples, and no principles that emerge from them. Some of them are loaded with how-tos and tactics. But although they tell us what to do, we never understand why we should do it, and with technologys rapid pace of change, those tidbits of knowledge spoil more quickly than an opened carton of yogurt. Then there are the big-picture pop business books that promise to deliver a whole new way of thinking. But that way of thinking often tends to be composed of just one idea. Usually, its not even a great idea.

Academic books usually arent much better. You know the ones I am talking about? Those thick, erudite academic volumes, usually written by B-school professors, that use complex and rigorous research and strong, original thinking, but that cloak them in inaccessible language and abstract sentences forms? Often when I finish reading one chapter of one of these books, I can barely remember what it was I was supposed to have learned. And because they are so abstract and high-level, they rarely engage us with examples or tell real, functioning managers what it is that we are supposed to do.