Chapter 4
Empowered Employees: The New Power Players
Just as the Social Age has empowered customers, it's also shifting power to employees who now carry the "big stick" of social media. In every aspect of employee relations-recruiting, retention, branding, training-workers can now hold employers accountable for transparency and responsibility.
The old "40-40-40 plan" (work forty hours weekly for forty years to earn forty percent pension) created an illusion of loyalty that masked darker realities: fear and repression. Employees were told they were "lucky to have a job" and to avoid "making waves." Social media has changed this dynamic completely, giving workers an amplified voice. Target learned this lesson when part-time employee Casey St. Clair created a Change.org petition against "Black Friday Creep" that garnered 375,000 signatures. Her complaint about being scheduled to work on Thanksgiving went viral, forcing Target into damage control during their crucial holiday season.
Beyond general platforms like Change.org, dedicated sites like Glassdoor have emerged specifically to amplify employee voices. Founded in 2008, Glassdoor serves as a crowd-sourced ratings bureau where job seekers can learn what it's really like to work at nearly 250,000 companies before accepting interviews.
Social media's dark side emerges when virtual lynch mobs form against employees who post inappropriate content. Take Lindsey Stone, who was fired after posting a photo of herself giving the middle finger at Arlington National Cemetery, or IAC's PR executive Justine Sacco who tweeted a racist "joke" about AIDS in Africa before boarding a flight. In both cases, public outrage forced employers to terminate employees to protect their brands.
In the Social Age, there is no longer a clear line between personal and professional lives. Once we accept those "Terms and Conditions" on social platforms, everything becomes fair game. Companies must protect themselves from potentially brand-damaging employee behavior, though this doesn't necessarily mean termination. Most socially aware organizations find that proactive monitoring of employees' public social presence is worth the effort, despite inevitable accusations of privacy invasion. The key is approaching these situations from a mentoring perspective-counseling and guiding respectfully rather than disciplining.
The most toxic social employee scenario occurs when those responsible for protecting your brand on social media turn against you. HMV learned this lesson the hard way when, during a mass layoff, their social media team began live-tweeting the "mass execution of loyal employees" from the company's official Twitter account. The marketing director's attempts to regain control-asking "How do I shut down Twitter?" and deleting tweets-only made matters worse, as screenshots had already spread among HMV's 65,000 followers. Similarly, StubHub suffered when an employee (likely accidentally) used the company account to call their workplace a "stubsucking hell hole." The deeper issue: why would an employee feel that way about their workplace?
In the Social Age, employee morale isn't just nice-to-have-it's essential. Truly engaged brand champions whose personal brands are tied to their employers would rarely consider such "treasonous" actions, even accidentally.
Chapter 5
Social Recruiting: The Talent Revolution
Modern recruiting, born in the late 1990s and barely a teenager, faces extinction from social recruiting. In the old days, employers would post tiny classified ads in Sunday papers, wait for faxed resumes, and make hiring decisions based solely on those documents. When job boards emerged during Web 1.0, the "Apply Now" button made applications effortless during 3.2% unemployment. This created a broken system where HR departments, drowning in applications, hid behind monitors and stopped communicating with candidates.
When the Great Recession hit in 2008, the flaws in the hiring process became glaringly obvious. Employers increasingly relied on applicant tracking systems (ATSs) that screened resumes by keywords, creating the infamous "resume black hole" where applications disappeared without response. Communication between employers and candidates deteriorated further as HR departments, overwhelmed by volume, retreated from human interaction. A vicious cycle emerged: more applications required more ATSs, which created more black holes, prompting desperate candidates to submit even more applications.
Social recruiting ranges from simply "using social media sites to hire" to a philosophical concept rather than a defined technique. The fundamental premise is straightforward: good people are increasingly online, so companies must recruit there to find them. The statistics are compelling: 88% of job seekers have at least one social profile, 75% of the American workforce consists of job seekers, and 69% of employed Americans are open to new opportunities. Recruiters have embraced this shift, with 98% using social media for recruiting (97% on LinkedIn, 60% on Facebook, 52% on Twitter).
A social media profile is far more human than a resume could ever be. Photos, passions beyond work, character, maturity, and honesty are all on display. For social recruiters, social media has replaced the resume as first impression and first contact. Candidates who pass this initial screening become prequalified-seen as good people, a good fit, and capable of doing the work. The subsequent phone and job interviews are often more an opportunity to mess up than to shine further.
Social Recruiting Puritans represent the dark side of this new approach. They eliminate candidates for trivial reasons-a red Solo cup in a photo, occasional swearing on Facebook, or expressing passionate opinions. Like traditional HR departments that favor "safe" candidates, these Puritans seek the compliant and quiet while avoiding risk. The problem? Many highly passionate, creative contributors aren't "safe" but deliver innovative solutions.
Even traditional enterprises have embraced social recruiting. According to the Social Recruitment Monitor in 2013, Northrup Grumman and Taco Bell led U.S. social recruiting, while Verizon Wireless Careers had the largest Facebook fan base and Starbucks Jobs the most Twitter followers. Their social champions like Tim McDonald, Shannon Smedstad, Emilie Mecklenborg, and Jeffrey Moore actively participate in Twitter chats, Google Hangouts, and Unconferences. Their secret? "More social. Less media." They don't just broadcast job openings-they mentor, advise, blog, and build relationships.
Employee referrals represent a recruiting gold mine. According to the Federal Reserve Bank, referred candidates are twice as likely to land interviews and have a 40 percent better chance of being hired after interviewing. Beyond referrals, social recruiting improves candidate experience, builds relationships, attracts more committed candidates, and helps build talent communities.
Chapter 6
The Engagement Era: Building Meaningful Connections
Engagement has become the cornerstone of the Social Age-not just a buzzword, but the essential foundation for success in a world gone social. True engagement isn't posting kitten memes or broadcasting blog links; it's communicating meaningfully with all stakeholders-customers, candidates, vendors, influencers and employees. It's quantifiable effort tied to loyalty, an emotional investment in a brand or mission, and maximum effort exchanged for maximum results, recognition and respect.
Building an engaged customer base and attractive employer brand is impossible without passionate, engaged employees as the foundation. Companies like In-N-Out Burger, Southwest Airlines, and Conrad Hotels understand this, treating employees with trust and respect as qualified adult decision makers. Engaged employees work harder toward common goals, feel personal commitment to the company mission, understand their roles, and tie their personal brands to their employer's success. They demonstrate greater flexibility, emotional intelligence, and longevity.
The Industrial Age's approach to engagement was largely performative and ineffective. Companies employed tricks like the suggestion box (which executives rarely acted upon), employee surveys (with zero follow-up), annual performance reviews (dreaded by all parties), and "need to know" Friday happy hours (scripted, manipulative events where real dialogue was discouraged). These weren't engagement strategies but hollow gestures that left employees feeling manipulated rather than valued.
Even before social media, engagement was fundamentally a leadership issue. Companies with approachable CEOs who interacted with team members fostered engaging cultures. Yet many executives still believe engagement should bubble up from below or that employees should bring their own engagement regardless of workplace conditions. The reality is that engagement flows from the top down, as illustrated by the tale of two CEOs: Dave, who awkwardly walked the sales floor with eyes down, making minimal contact and correcting an employee's behavior; and Bud, his replacement, who researched employees beforehand, connected on LinkedIn, mentioned them on Twitter, and created genuine human connections by sitting in the break room, engaging in casual conversation, and becoming a role model for engagement. Within thirty days, the sales team began voluntarily seeking out Bud, trust developed, best practices were shared, and sales dramatically increased.
In the Social Age, engagement can't be mandated but must be cultivated through open, collaborative environments. Social networks have become our ears, eyes, and mouth-in that order. The old tools of engagement have been replaced: suggestion boxes by real-time digital communication, annual surveys by always-available feedback loops, and performance reviews by real-time recognition. Companies now monitor Twitter for brand mentions, watch LinkedIn groups for industry influencers' thoughts, observe Facebook and Google+ communities to measure stakeholder sentiment, and track review sites like Yelp and Glassdoor.
When Ted needed new running shoes, he called Zappos-a company renowned for customer service-but received disappointing help. After tweeting to Zappos, Nike, Reebok, and New Balance with no meaningful response, a small eight-person startup called Topo Athletics seized the opportunity. Their intern Alex Stoyle, monitoring social media through Sprout Social, followed the basic rules of social selling: actively listen, respond quickly, and meet customers where they are. Alex called Ted directly, answered his questions, brought in product design expertise when needed, and made the sale. Ted then shared this experience with his 300,000 followers. The story expanded when Becky Robinson, who had observed the interaction, featured Topo in an article picked up by Fox Small Business Center. Topo's responsive engagement earned them not just customers but passionate brand advocates, while the established companies missed the opportunity completely.
Chapter 7
Building Communities That Drive Business Success
For organizations that have gained traction, with early adopters loving their product and employees fully engaged, the next evolution in the Social Age is building an online community. These communities unite internet users passionate about a brand or cause, bonded by common purpose and companionship. The best communities leverage existing success, develop trust, build human relationships with customers, and exceed expectations.
YouTern, co-author Mark's startup, demonstrates the transformative power of community. Originally envisioned as a service bureau for college career centers, the company faced a crisis when those centers had no budget during the recession. Six weeks from launch, the team pivoted to a content-rich site supported exclusively through social media-despite Mark's initial skepticism about social platforms. After reluctantly joining a Twitter chat, Mark discovered 200 job seekers, career experts and recruiters sharing knowledge selflessly. YouTern embraced blogging and value-added content, focusing on helping young careerists get jobs in a tough economy.
After a year of hard work without salaries, YouTern began appearing on "Top 100" lists, with Mark cited as a "Gen Y expert." The tipping point came when Mashable listed YouTern as a "Top 5 Online Community for Starting Your Career," followed by mentions in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Bloomberg News. Without spending a penny on traditional advertising, YouTern became an "overnight sensation" built entirely through social engagement. Today, YouTern sees a million unique visitors annually, hosts weekly Twitter chats with 100-200 participants, and has become one of the top 20 Twitter accounts shared by recruiters-all on a monthly operating budget under $1,000.
Building a strong social community as your brand cornerstone can transform your organization's reach and impact. The most successful community-driven brands share key characteristics: First, they're social from the top down, with leaders like Richard Branson, Arianna Huffington, and Jeff Weiner embracing social as both competitive differentiator and relationship builder. Second, they build around a common purpose or need. Communities created solely to sell products invariably fail, as do those focused on specific platforms rather than missions. Third, they prioritize the community's goals over self-promotion. Fourth, they meet members where they live online, whether on LinkedIn Groups, Facebook pages, Pinterest, Twitter chats, or Google Hangouts. Fifth, they maintain consistent facilitation. Without constant posts, interaction, and moderation, communities die slowly. Sixth, they enable self-moderation. When trolls attack, healthy communities don't need moderators to intervene-members rush to defend the community themselves. Seventh, they encourage knowledge sharing and self-learning. Finally, they welcome thoughtful debate while avoiding groupthink, and they make members feel special through a "red velvet rope" mindset that treats each person as important to the community's success.
As your community grows, its most passionate members-perhaps just 1% of all users-naturally evolve into advocates, champions, and ambassadors. These enthusiastic supporters become force multipliers for your social efforts, helping overcome the limitation of having only so many staff members assigned to community management. As a community leader, your role is to identify these organic evangelists and build mutually beneficial relationships with each. Find ways they can help the community while also benefiting their personal brands.
Every community eventually faces adversarial members-drama queens, divas, and trolls. For these contrarians who consistently insult, offend, or bully community members, the best approach is simple: "Starve the trolls. Feed the tribe." When dealing with trolls, first try bringing them back from "the dark side," perhaps even offering them constructive roles. If these efforts fail, be prepared to terminate the relationship. Unchecked trolls are contagious-they create divisiveness, drive away passionate members, and replace companionship with confrontation.
Chapter 8
The Death of Large: How Social Is Reshaping Business Structure
Social collaboration is changing life as we know it. Fueled by economic shifts, changing work attitudes, and widespread distrust of large enterprises, social media has become the catalyst that will end how legacy enterprises operate, lead, and profit. For many, the Social Age will lead to their demise; those unwilling to change will cease to exist.
The authors acknowledge their claim sounds far-fetched but outline key points supporting their thesis: Be nimble or be dead; go nano or go home; management is unnecessary; managers cost too much; scale limits growth; small is here to stay; social will be the bane of large. What makes today different is that social and collaboration technology transform nimble, flat organizations into irresistible forces of nature.
For historical perspective, not many generations ago, all companies were small. William Carnegie (Andrew Carnegie's father) made finely woven damask cloth on a one-man loom in his modest home, selling to neighbors or merchants. The Industrial Revolution changed everything. Advances in technology made large factories possible, allowing one capitalist to employ thousands of laborers on huge mechanical looms. By 1913, when Henry Ford brought the assembly line to automobile manufacturing, cottage production was dead in virtually every field. The enterprise-the "very large company"-ruled, and has continued to rule business for a full century.
The "Aha!" moment that crystallized our thinking about the Social Age came from Ted's conversation with Bronson Taylor of Growth Hacker TV. When Bronson met a business development entrepreneur, instead of taking a job offer, they formed an instant partnership. Within seven weeks, GrowthHacker.tv was live and profitable, with a break-even point under $1,000 monthly. The three-person team did most work themselves, outsourcing specialized tasks like video backgrounds, voice-overs, and payment processing. Where a major network might spend millions and employ thousands to launch a show, these entrepreneurs did it with virtually no money in less than two months, reaching hundreds of thousands of viewers as guests shared episodes across their networks.
The nano corporation is the perfect "killer app"-small teams of inspired professionals who come together to create exceptional products, then disperse when the project completes. Different teams handle marketing and sales, often composed of other nano corps like independent distributors. These teams self-assemble, disassemble, and reassemble at will, driven by passion rather than bureaucracy.
Hollywood has operated on the nano model for a century-hundreds of team members come together to make films, then disassemble just as quickly when production wraps. Even with $300 million blockbusters, this model prevails. Modern corporations have been moving in this direction since the 1970s, shifting from employing every function in-house to relying on consultants, contractors, and outsourced services.
While nano companies like GHTV can make decisions almost instantly, large corporations suffer from layers of bureaucracy. Multiple committees and task forces must approve changes, often taking months or years to implement good ideas-if they survive at all. Projects with no immediate ROI are frequently killed to boost quarterly earnings, especially creative ideas that challenge norms. In today's creative knowledge economy, scale no longer provides the same advantages it did for industrial manufacturing.
Legacy enterprises that don't embrace social collaboration face extinction. They're marching toward obsolescence while nimbler competitors leverage both traditional advantages and Social Age tools. The evidence is everywhere: Amazon versus Sears and JCPenney; Ford and Tesla outperforming GM and Chrysler; Red Bull dominating traditional beverage companies; The New Yorker and Rolling Stone thriving on Twitter while print magazines die; Virgin America engaging customers while United and Delta broadcast defensively.
Chapter 9
The Future of Business in a World Gone Social
The authors begin with an important confession: no one truly knows social media's future impact on business or its full potential. They caution against self-proclaimed "ninjas" or "gurus" claiming otherwise. Instead, they offer their hopes for social's maturation, including removal of digital borders between networks, standardized reporting for analytics, better B2C engagement tools, and more accessible data solutions for smaller businesses.
Despite skeptics who claim employee-first, customer-centric cultures are too idealistic, the authors predict OPEN collaboration will become standard practice. They argue that seemingly "lazy" employees and "apathetic" customers simply haven't been properly engaged. When both groups are emotionally invested-like Wikipedia's volunteer contributors-they'll actively improve products, provide feature input, and function as a massive focus group. Forward-thinking companies will ask customers to help design products before development, potentially creating gamified challenges where consumers design innovative products and generate tremendous market buzz.
3D printing will revolutionize consumerism, the authors predict. They cite Easton LaChappelle, who at 17 created a brain-controlled prosthetic arm for under $500 using online information and a 3D printer. With printers already available for $500, they envision a near future where consumers can instantly print products they discover online-from dresses to vases-customized to their specifications.
Digital sharecropping-building your brand presence primarily on platforms controlled by others-poses a growing threat to businesses. Just as post-Civil War sharecroppers improved land they didn't own and had no control over, companies relying heavily on social networks, WordPress, LinkedIn or eBay risk having their business models undermined by sudden changes to terms, privacy policies, or APIs. The authors cite Facebook's pay-to-play model, Twitter's changing terms, and Google's algorithm shifts as concerning examples. They advise owning domain names, creating original content, building custom apps, and developing intellectual property on sustainable platforms you control.
Even early social media adopters are experiencing burnout from divas, trolls, narcissistic chats, inauthentic brands, and relentless self-promoters. To combat this fatigue, the authors recommend: avoiding contributing negativity to social streams, deliberately being a "relentless giver," stepping away when caught in the echo chamber of repetitive content, and making it a goal to meet someone amazing online daily.
The authors argue that in a world gone social, business is ruled by chaos theory-we can't predict outcomes in straightforward ways. While the Social Circle of Life and analytics help anticipate some changes, true social leadership means owning the chaos. Rather than scheduling meetings to discuss potential changes, successful social leaders anticipate chaos, quickly assess available data, and pivot immediately while competitors are still forming committees.
Drawing parallels to Copernicus and Galileo who challenged established beliefs despite persecution, the authors position social leaders as modern-day "Rebel Heretics" who must challenge outdated leadership practices. They outline essential actions for these change agents: becoming hyperaware of social's positive and negative potential, giving customers authentic voices, hiring for future culture, respecting employees as mature adults, actively listening to all stakeholders, tapping into OPEN networks, becoming nimble "nano" organizations, democratizing workplaces by dismantling hierarchies, bringing reluctant executives along, earning relevance through content marketing, mastering analytics, and becoming "Blue Unicorn" leaders who exemplify active listening and service. The authors emphasize that only those bold enough to be different will thrive in the Social Age.
