The Executive's Guide to Enterprise Social Media Strategy: How Social Networks Are Radically Transforming Your Business

CHAPTER 1

Speed, Scope, Complexity, Power, and Potential

What’s really going on in technology is not a “social media” revolution but an “e-social” revolution, one that involves not just how we interact with others, but how we choose to create things of value, how we transfer value from soul to soul, how we evaluate our existence and try to improve it.

—Don Peppers

Here is a great story told to us while we were researching this book. We’ve taken out the names of the hotels to avoid any appearance of favoritism or bias.

I’m standing in the queue at Hotel A in Las Vegas, waiting to check in. Normally the check-in queues there move pretty fast, but today they aren’t. A bunch of us are just standing there, waiting with our bags. Something is clearly wrong at the check-in counter, but no one is telling us anything. I check Twitter on my iPhone and I can see that people are tweeting from the queue I’m standing in. I’ve experienced this before, and it’s amusing, but no big deal.

Then I see a tweet from someone at the Hotel Z, a couple of blocks down the Strip. The tweet says something like “Hey, if you’re tired of standing on line at Hotel A, come on over to Hotel Z. We’ll set you up with a room—at 50 percent off the regular price.”

Then I see a couple of people pick up their bags and head out for the taxi stand. Wow, I thought, somebody at Hotel Z is on the ball.

We’re including this story because it’s true and because in one fell swoop it illustrates the speed, scope, complexity, power, ...