Social Media has take the business world by storm.  There are those companies who have embraced the technologies and succeeded. There are those who have attempted to embrace the technologies but have not delivered the ROI they were expecting.

Enterprise Social Technology was recommended to me by a client.  The CEO of the organisation had read the book and had driven social media to one of the key objectives this year as part of their overall marketing strategy.

The strap line for the book ‘ Helping organisations harness the power of social media, social networking and social relevance’ gives the overview of what the book ‘s about.

I have previously written about digital darwinism and why companies need to understand how social media can create that competitive advantage.  This book gives a good understanding of how companies can achieve that.

The key aspects to successfully embedding and running any social media campaign within a company are covered in the book:

• Setting the goals
• Getting the right team and skills required
• Governance and stakeholder buyin internally
• Aligning social media with other web / internet activities (website, email marketing content online, website)
• Integrating social media into sales process
• Creating the buzz and monitoring
• Reputation management
• Metrics of success
• Pilot project – setting it up

This audience of this book is for larger SME+ who are tentatively starting their first social media project, as it gives a good overall framework of how to approach the project internally.

Interestingly this book was crowdsourced – from the book cover to the themes of the chapters were defined by a community of social media practioners.

However this book shouldn’t be read in isolation as there are key aspects that also need to be considered:

How to be found in Google, Social Media & blogs – how to integrate social media into other online marketing

The Art of Community – how to build and sustain an online community