Great new book on social media for corporations

Last week I attended a webinar title "Join the Groundswell in Enterprise Social Software" hosted by Lithium and authors of a new Forrester book titled "Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies ".

It focused on successful examples of using social media to enhance a company’s dialog with its customers online. The reoccurring theme was that people are already talking about your brand online whether it is on blogs, discussion boards or portals. And the recommendation was to embrace this medium and participate in the discussion versus becoming a spectator. Ultimately doing this will give you a deeper understand of your customers and help to retain and recruit new brand advocates.

There was some great advice for things to consider before adding a community and social networking feature to your site. If you’re currently wrangling with community and social media ideas and want somewhere to start I would suggest doing what I did and ordering the book.

Recent validation of Linkedin - networking 2.0

I recently had a situation in my day job where more work than we could handle. I needed a qualified group of five internet developers with varied skill sets such as: XHTML/CSS, Flash, .NET, PHP and we needed them quickly.

Formally we would try two things:

• Mine existing freelance resources
• Go to a local staffing firm that specializes in interactive to find the desired candidate(s)

We tried option one, and everyone we knew was committed. Option two takes time and we were under the gun with tight deadlines.

So what do you where you in a bind and need to recruit in a vacuum? Networking 2.0 utilizing your social networks!

Within a few hours of identifying the need I hit my LinkedIn network. By the end of the day I had answers and people lined up to do the work. It was instant validation to me of the power of social networking tools like LinkedIn, and putting my network that i'd built overtime to work for me.