Review: The NOW Revolution & The Shift To Real-Time Business

On Friday, I had the opportunity to see one of one my favorite speakers in action at Social Media AZ. @JayBaer presented with his co-author @AmberCadabra on their new book, The NOW Revolution – 7 Shifts To Make Your Business Faster, Smarter and More Social (you can get a free chapter when you visit the site).  Now I consider myself very lucky to have met Jay and Amber a couple of years ago and have enjoyed following their blogs at Convince And Convert and Brass Tack Thinking.  So when their book was released and it was announced they would be attending #SMAZ to speak and promote their book, I was super excited and they didn’t disappoint in their presentation or in their first book.

Over the weekend, I sat down with the book and thoroughly enjoyed the read.  As mentioned in the book, it can be argued that business has changed more in the last 3 years more than it has in the last 30 – especially when we look at how companies and customers interact and communicate.  We’ve gone from writing letters to companies which could be responded to by a company in weeks to telephone calls and emails to now Tweets, Facebook updates, blogs and review sites where custoemrs expect or demand a response from the business in a matter of hours, not days or weeks.  That is the nature of social media and real-time business today.

One of the key premises of the book isn’t so much about how a compay should DO Social, but rather, how a company must adapt to BE Social and thrive in a real-time business scenario.  Yes, real-time business, which is what is happening as companies start to look at what social media really means to their business.   However, in order to BE social, a company will need to look at more than merely hiring a Community Manager or college graduate to monitor a Twitter account and Facebook page.  Rather, successful companies will need to make 7 significant shifts in their business to accomodate the demands of real-time business across the entire organization in order to survive the coming years.  These 7 shifts are -

• Engineer A New Bedrock
• Find Talent You Can Trust
• Organize Your Armies
• Answer the New Telephone
• Emphasize Response-Ability
• Build a Fire Extinguisher
• Make a Calculator

The book goes in great detail about each shift and offers a bunch of great resources to help you better understand and begin to make each shift.  Resources that you have access to include white papers, video interviews, printable guides and much more.  You’ll also be introduced to the concept of tagging with Microsoft tags which are how you access the additional content which is kinda cool.

When speaking to audiences on social media, I tell business owners the same thing.  Social isn’t just about the tactics surrounding social media sites but rather realizing that every customer and employee should be considered a reporter and every reporter should be considered a potential customer or employee.  That can be incredibly scary to most business owners, but as mentioned in the book and echoed by Francine Hardaway in her article for Fast Company, companies that don’t adapt their entire business to that way of thinking simply won’t make it and will go out of business, replaced by companies that do.

Just look at the stats in one of my favorite social media videos – The Social Media Revolution.

I believe that one of the most impactful slide is the one that states, “The ROI of Social Media is Your Business Will Still Exist in 5 years”.  Powerful statement but when combined with my other favorite quote from the video “We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media, the quesioon is how well we DO it.” the writing is on the wall.  But remember, it’s not about just DOING social as much as it is how you instill the idea of BEING social into your organization that will make the difference.

In addition to the great points, information and resources contained in the book, the authors are just as colorful in print as they are in real life.  There are humorous analogies and quips throughout the book that had me laughing through every chapter.  My two favorites are…

“Like malt liquor, the advantage of free tools is obviously the low cost. They’re easy, cheap and do a satisfactory job in many circumstances.”

“We welcome numerical vagary and imprecision into our businesses like a box of free Krispy Kremes.”

Overall, a great book that I highly recommend.  I’d also like to give my friend Chris Sietsema of Teach To Fish Digial a shout out on the great job he did with the info-graphics in the book.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.