I preface this by saying I read both Jay and Amber in their blogs and suggest you do so as well.With that, I was disappointed.
I'm not entirely sure who this book was written for. I know who they SAY it is for. The people on the cover tell me who it is for and plenty of folks online have said, but I wonder if we've read the same book.
You can read the first chapter for FREE here. The introduction says that this book is a "playbook for making [the changes needed to address current challenges faced by business in a synchronous world], and for reexamining and retooling your company or organization to make real-time business work for you, rather than against you."
The opening of the book isn't much different from any management book you might pick up such as the always popular "Good to Great," which does get cited at one point early (without much surprise).
There are lots of buzz words and some decent case study examples, but the audience for this book is too scatter shot. And probably minuscule.
If it is for C-suite folks, the Microsoft tags to additional material is probably going to float right past them and much of the slightly technical talking points might seem too like minutiae to worry about.
If it was for the bloggers that they used to promote the book, they will be bored quickly as they know all this.
If it is for a small business, well most of the examples don't apply.
If it's for a large corporation, they are just going to hire someone to do this.
So who is this book for?
There is some discussion early on about how far we've come- but who doesn't know that at any pretty much any level. Either you are
a. aware of it and know that you should have adapted and have;
b. are aware of it but have not adapted because of cost or culture;
c. or perhaps have NO NEED to because their customers are not that savvy yet.
I guess there is a SMALL percentage of the right size businesses that aren't on board or completely ignorant of this social media business train, but I'm missing who they are. And if they are that ignorant, I guess this book might be the hammer over the head that gets them to move- maybe?
This book felt like it should have been a HUGE blog post- the references always felt like there should have been a hyperlink. They refer to things and tell you you look them on the Internet. This feels like it should only be read on the Interwebs. Maybe you Kindle buyers have an advantage?
I've read many of the reviews but these folks are overselling some points but the one that gets me more than anything else the Microsoft QR tags. I like the idea of including QR codes, but not everyone has a smart phone meaning every single tag was worthless to me and probably about 50% of the readers of this book. It's a tease to say, here's a link to something cool to explicate what we have talked about, but you can't see it. Apparently even more grating to those that might have a smart-phone, you still need to download the specific APP.
I still love'em, but like I said, disappointed.
