The Most Powerful Brand on Earth: How to Transform Teams, Empower Employees, Integrate Partners, and Mobilize Customers to Beat the Competition in Digital and Social Media

by Chris Boudreaux, Susan F. Emerick

Brands that thrive and profit from employee and customer empowerment generate significantly greater awareness and revenues, while also decreasing the costs of marketing, selling, and customer service. However, employees must engage in public, real-time conversations. And most people are not professional communicators.

Achieving those outcomes requires new skills, business processes, governance, measurement, and infrastructure. In addition, leaders must learn new ways of managing risk, while helping employees build and manage external relationships in real time. Now, in The Most Powerful Brand on Earth, social business pioneers Chris Boudreaux and Susan Emerick help you successfully manage all these changes. Drawing on their experience leading social media transformations at IBM and other top companies, they present frameworks and case studies from key innovators that show how to

-Leverage the surprising dynamics of online influence -Plan, execute, and manage the development of key relationships -Measure outcomes and performance in effective and useful ways -Resolve crucial security, privacy, and regulatory issues that arise when others represent you online -Gain crucial support from leaders, participants, and other stakeholders -Empower the people and teams you attract, hire, and support -Navigate cultural and process changes that will make or break your program -Preview trends that will shape your social empowerment programs in coming years

Genres: Business

215 pages, Hardcover

First published May 19, 2013

Reviews

[Walter Adamson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book as a very practical and also insightful overview as to what could be achieved (and how it was achieved) by implementing a profound social business strategy (as in empowering enterprise social media inside and outside an organisation). Even today (2019) very few organisations have managed to do this. IBM was many years ahead. I suppose one question to ask today, as I write this review on 1/1/2019, is whether the payoff has accrued to IBM, since the market has a rather adverse view of the stock. Would it have been worse without the effort to build a social business? I don’t know. But what remains clear to me today is that the opportunity to capture competitive advantage through the strategies described in the book remain as valid as ever, if not more so.

[Jeremy Solly · Rating 4 out of 5]

The advice in this book is pretty timeless, even though it covers an industry (social media) that changes frequently. They do a good job of staying platform / tool agnostic and focus rather on strategy and tactics for a successful employee advocacy program.