NAILBA Perspectives - July/August 2014 - (Page 41)

reading ahead Building a Successful Network What have you recently read that inspired you to look differently at the way you're doing business? NAILBA welcomes your recommendations for books or blogs that you find helpful in shaping the way you do business. Contact Rachel Marineau, CMP, NAILBA's Manager of Meetings and Education, at 703.383.3069 or rmarineau@nailba.org and share your reading list. Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers and Transform Your Business Josh Bernoff, with co-author Ted Schadler Our interconnected hi-tech world is empowering customers as never before. To meet this challenge companies must put the power of technology into the hands of employees to help customers solve problems. Whereas disgruntled employees and customers can easily turn to social media to harm a company's reputation (intentionally or unintentionally), companies in turn need to learn how to leverage social media to build their brand image. Empowered tells the stories of how Best Buy has set up a help force through Twitter, how Black & Decker has enabled their staff to submit user-generated video that has turned into a useful training and feedback resource, and how many other organizations have benefited when their employees have been given the green light to use new technology tools. Author Josh Bernoff and coauthor Ted Schadler provide a primer for building an organization that welcomes and utilizes its employees growing use and understanding of social media. Staff are already using social tools to connect with one another, and with your customers, suppliers, and stakeholders building solutions and workarounds as they go. It's time to work with these employees, identified as HEROs (Highly Empowered and Resourceful Operators) to bring their skills to the forefront and tweak them to fit the needs of the company. Social media gives businesses the tools to reach customers. It has created communities, but also provided the tools necessary to help engaged, empowered employees solve problems and create new relationships with customers that simply weren't available before. Look at the ways social media is used and approached in your business and contemplate what may be possible with a bit of help from new found HEROs. The Network Is Your Customer David Rogers Author David Rogers believes that, "Today, business needs a new paradigm: the customer network. In customer networks, customers are no longer viewed as isolated individuals but are seen as dynamic and interactive participants in a network...We need to rethink our image of customers, from individuals to networks." In The Network is Your Customer, Rogers helps the reader understand that while an organization's use of social media is laudable it will get that company nowhere if they do not first build with the desired end result in mind. This is best done by creating an internetbased strategy that can be adapted to the customers' needs while also benefitting the business. He dedicates a chapter to a specific planning and implementation process that will help businesses apply these ideas to their specific situations. Rogers identifies five main strategies to thrive in customer networks: ■■ Access: Be faster, easier, everywhere, and always on; ■■ Engage: Become a trusted source of valued content that includes information, advice, constructive criticism; ■■ Customize: Make everything you offer adaptable to your customer's needs; ■■ Connect: Become part of your customer's conversations; ■■ Collaborate: Involve your customers at every stage of your enterprise. Collaboration is key. Many customers will say it's feeling appreciated that makes them eager to do business with a company and keeps them coming back, especially when they are easy to do business with. To assist in applying his strategies, Rogers offers more than 100 mini-case studies throughout the book that showcase how each of these principles have been successfully deployed by companies, big and small, in different industries. www.nailba.org 41 http://www.nailba.org

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of NAILBA Perspectives - July/August 2014

NAILBA Perspectives - July/August 2014
Contents
Chairman’s Corner
CEO Insights
Social Skills
NAILBA 33 Preview
NAILBA Charitable Foundation
Life Happens
The Remote or Virtual Office
Member Profiles
Mooers Award Nominations
Agency Successor Networking Group
Agency Resources
BGAs Leading Technology Through Connections
Reading Ahead
Calendar of Events
Index of Advertisers

NAILBA Perspectives - July/August 2014