Be on the stamp that everybody wants to find! The book is structured around an easy-to-remember acrostic. “Stamp” stands for the five habits of digital leadership:

• SIMPLE: success is the result of simplification and process
• TRUE: be true to your passion
• ACT: nothing happens without action—take the first step
• MAP: goals and visions are needed to get where you want to be.
• PEOPLE: success doesn’t happen in a vacuum

Each of the chapters provides examples and anecdotes illustrating the topic at hand. Most of them are taken from the analog world on purpose: You don’t need to be a digital native to become a digital leader. A leader is a leader, and anybody can become a digital leader. Social media is not some form of black magic that obliges you to become somebody you are not or do not want to become. Rather, it is an environment that invites you to find the quintessence of who you are and what you want to say in order to be understood and interesting. Make technology work for you! The content of leadership may not intrinsically be different from what it is in the physical world, except that you must make your messages even more zen in order to render them more effective as well as more universal (and show a heightened sensitivity to the diversity of the people that constitute your digital friends or followers). Leaders, whether analog or digital, define their goals, pick their fight, shape their paths in order to shape the path of others.

Your true personality is just a camera phone away from being discovered… Do digital citizens lose some of their identity or betray their passions as they clean up their act and expurgate their texts of sarcasm or any form of nastiness? Maybe. Maybe not, if social media is more than an outlet for your random stream of conscience. The world of social media is undergoing the same evolution as the early days of blogging that progressively went from a public psychoanalytic “Say everything” craze to a consummate art of edited spontaneity. “The digital revolution has connected our integrity and reputation in a way never seen before.” No need to lament and dream of a golden era when we could separate our personal and professional lives and fancy ourselves as healthy Jekylls and Hydes. “Your true personality is just a camera phone away from being discovered,” Qualman reminds us, echoing the Zuckerberg’s statement in The Facebook Effect: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of lack of integrity.” While it’s true that in the digital era, “someone is watching us all the time,” it’s also true it gives us the ability to work on our personal unity and confidence, “recreate” ourselves — to take leadership over own lives — while easily accessing a wide audience, connecting and engaging with people. We lead by empowering others and “grow as they grow.”

One of the remarkable qualities of the book is that it dispels the threat that social media still signify to many people. Qualman is not lecturing you into becoming social media addicts to survive. Instead, his tone is inviting: “Digital Leaders are Made—Not Born.” Any individual can thrive in the digital era by creating output that unites people instead of dividing them. A very good book! Very human.

*I wrote a post about Socialnomics at the end of 2009.

It took about ten years for Brick-and-Mortars to figure out how they could best exist within the Web 1.0. They will have far less time to understand that marketing is turning into a completely new social and linguistic genre. Erik Qualman’s book, Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do business is an effective wake-up call for corporations and marketers, and is written by a sincere and authentic practitioner.

Amazon, Qualman reminds us, did a stellar job when it introduced the concept of affinity marketing, but as efficient as it was, it had its shortcomings, especially if buying My Little Pony for your niece was a one-time thing. Going a step further, Amazon started to showcase other books that people who bought the same book as the one you are looking at, also bought. The social media approach is a next era and shows that in the “people-driven economy,” effective affinity marketing is a contagious recommendation process operating within affinity groups. Instead of being told what people in general are interested in, we want to know what people in our network, people we appreciate, would advise based on their experience – an experience to which we tend to pay attention because we generally trust our friends.  “People referring products and services via social media are the new king. It is the world’s largest referral program in history.” This is a new world that Qualman calls “the world of socialnomics.”

A few years ago, the very notion of “socialnomics” would have sounded like an odd linguistic construct, and, in the end, simply meant “management/rules of what is social,” just as economics originally designates the management/rules of a household. In many respects, the term “socionomics,” coined by Prechter in 1999, could have also been used, as it is the “study of social mood and its results in social actions.” However, through the word “socialnomics,” Qualman wants to emphasize the idea of an economy governed – I should say “mediated” — by social media as it leads to the creation of innumerable communities and tribes. This “social-media mediation” is perceived by individuals as a form of disintermediation and deliverance, shielding them from the marketing litanies imposed upon them by impersonal marketing machines. What we hear in our social media world comes from people we have chosen to listen to. The intermediaries are not mercenary message-carriers (or so we hope), they are peers of sorts and therefore, are not perceived as middlemen (even when there can be a bit of a sandwich man about them). This is why the world of “socialnomics” is not felt as yet another form of social pressure. We have the freedom to select the circles to which we belong, ensure that they mirror our needs and tastes, exchange points of views and ask questions with the hope of getting a candid response.

The eight chapters of the books analyze the new challenges and opportunities that the social media re-segmentation and restructuring of the market will present to businesses. Are customers going to reduce their reliance on the results they get from search engines? It is most likely. “I care more about what my neighbor thinks than what Google thinks,” if I want to buy a baby seat. It is also obvious that customers expect companies to converse with them in “open, two-way conversations” and that customer “services” are poised to become the customers’ voice and, consequently, a central part of marketing departments. Therefore, “businesses need to fully transform to properly address the impact and demands of social media.” And companies that fear to venture into the open, display their customers in the social media fora, will atrophy much faster than they think. Installed bases are joining the “Glass House Generation” at a fast pace, and follow its lifestyle — hang out anywhere and at all times in public view. Qualman indicates that “by 2012, eMarketer projects that more than 800 million users worldwide will participate in social networks via their mobile device, up from 82 million in 2007.” Meeting these new challenges as well as leveraging these new opportunities will definitely require new skills and new tools! 

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis  

More about the word “socionomics”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socionomics