Christer Holloman - The Social Media MBA: Your Competitive Edge in Social Media Strategy Development and Delivery

PREFACE

Resources allocated, strategies drafted, tweets posted but the lords work is never done

This book is the first of its kind in the third and final wave of social media literature. It is targeting professionals like you, who work for organizations that already use social media and have been doing so for a while.

I was in your shoes about 18 months ago. I worked as a consultant for a subsidiary of a British media conglomerate when they asked me to review their social media strategy. In my case, it turned out that this so called strategy was pretty undefined. Their execution mainly focused on blogging and the method of measuring the return was rudimentary to say the least. When it became clear that this company was barely scratching the surface of what they could achieve with social media I had a very strong intuitive feeling in my stomach that this was an amazing opportunity for me to really make a difference.

Whatever your continent, industry, company size, current degree of social media adoption or job title, the purpose of this book is to inspire you to see your situation as I saw mine. It will give you the tools to make a difference to your organizations social media strategy development and delivery going forward. In addition it will also give you further intellectual support and the confidence to discuss social media on a higher level with peers, inspire colleagues or negotiate and create support for additional investments from your leadership team.

Why I Created This Book

When I was about to embark on the social media strategy review journey explained above, I looked high and low for literature and advice that could help me. I quickly established that until now there seem to have been two waves of social media books:

• First were the theoretical books of almost social anthropological nature, talking about the potential of Web 2.0, user generated content as the new democracy, the power of online communities and so on. Everything felt like yesterdays news, was too theoretical to actually be useful and didnt offer any hands on advice for businesses.
• The second wave came when companies realized that everyone was doing social media and they wanted to get on it. These books are like ABC guides for kids, how to get more followers on Twitter, how to write a good blog post and so on. Helpful about two years ago yes, but this kind of advice is far too elementary for people like us.

There were also a couple of other things that annoyed me about all the materials I came across: mainly that they were written by some self acclaimed expert. Why should anyone trust what one person says about anything? Finally, most social media books available today are written by US authors with a US perspective. How does this translate to the global reality of aspiring businesses? No one uses Twitter in China!

I figured it was time for a new generation of books on this topic.

How I Created It

I set out to make the book I couldnt find, that addressed all the issues I had come across in my own market research, pitched at a social media maturity level relevant for my organization today.

The first decision I made was not to write this book alone, I wanted the best people to share their experiences. The second decision was that I would not only work with people from a particular region, but across the globe. Thirdly I wanted a mix of contributors from the corporate side as well as the agency world, representing companies and clients ranging from manufacturing to services, from B2C to B2B, from high end to high street.

Through my role as technology trend commentator for Sky News and chairman of First Tuesday UK I have had the opportunity to get to know Eb Adeyeri over the years in his capacity as the Digital Director at Lewis PR. Ive always admired his refreshing no nonsense business approach to social media. I ran my idea past him and asked if he wanted to be a part of it: he said yes straight away. When I asked him whom he follows and turns to for social media inspiration, he gave me some names that I added to my own list. I continued to invite people from the list and those that said yes I asked the same question to. So it went on until I had 15 peer reviewed and approved co-authors from four continents and case studies from eight global and local brands, each prepared by their respective social media leader.

Given my brief, as outlined earlier, and with you as our intended target audience we collaboratively brainstormed chapter ideas. From that the structure was developed and everyone set to work. The title was born later, when it became obvious that we had created nothing short of a specialized MBA. Just like a traditional MBA you will be blasted by stimulating ideas from a range of lecturers to set you up for impressing at work, not to mention access to a global alumni network of industry peers.

For more information about the co-authors and their contact details, should you like to connect with them directly, please see the Biography section at the end of the book.