Anthony J. BradleyI’m very happy to announce that “The Social Organization” is now available for purchase. I co-authored the book with Mark P. McDonald, Group Vice President in Gartner’s Executive Programs. Harvard Business Review Press is our publisher.
So you may be asking, why write another book on social media?
We wrote it because, despite the number of social media books out there, there is still a significant hole. And that is, how, as an organization, do you actually do it? How do you use social media to identify, catalyze, empower, and derive value from a community and their mass collaboration? How do you, as a leader and manager, help your organization build a competency in using social media to foster productive collaboration—with your customers, your clients, your employees, and others along your value chain?
This book is not an introductory book. It assumes you have a basic understanding of social media, and its potential value and are now interested in strategically employing it for business or mission value. Also, it is not a technology book. It is a business book targeted at business leaders. We believe strongly that organizational success with social media is fundamentally a leadership and management challenge, not a technology issue.
And real success is far more than creating a marketing presence on Facebook, Twitter, QZone, etc. This is a book dedicated to the bigger question of how to achieve broad and sustainable success, as an organization, using social media. It addresses the leadership, management, and operational capabilities you must build to achieve meaningful, repeatable, and significant business value with these powerful new technologies.
We created this book based on extensive experience working with business leaders around the world and observing social media successes and failures. In 2009 we began an extensive study of more than four hundred social media initiatives to further explore and analyze findings from our regular Gartner client interactions. We focused on how “traditional” (in other words, non–Web-based) companies are using social media to create collaborative communities that include their customers, their employees, their suppliers, etc. We intentionally avoided initiatives that used social media simply as additional marketing communication channels. It’s not that social media communications aren’t important to business. But much greater value comes from the mass collaboration—both inside and outside the enterprise—that social media technology now makes possible.
I don’t want to spend too much time here describing the book. The Amazon.com “Look Inside” capability provides a wealth of information including the Table of Contents, Preface and Chapter 1. I encourage you to check it out.
Here are some other good resources for the book:
Gartner’s “The Social Organization” Web site
Our “The Social Organization” Facebook page
We spent almost three years researching and writing this book. Our goal is to provide you with guidance, techniques, and tools to accelerate your progress and dramatically increase your chances of success in strategically employing social media. We hope you find it enlightening and highly useful. We also hope you enjoy it but we know this is asking a lot of a business book 
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