Publisher Description

Almost no one had heard of social media a decade ago, but today websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have more than 1 billion users and account for almost 25 percent of Internet use. Practically overnight, social media seems indispensable to our lives--from friendship and dating to news and business. What makes social media so differen

Back Cover

"Piskorski accessed Silicon Valley's storied social media firms and has returned with the keys to the kingdom for understanding what makes 'social web strategies' the real killer app behind social media. Anyone who wants to enhance the user experience must read this book." --Brian Uzzi, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University " A Social Strategy is a remarkable book--perhaps the first truly comprehensive examination of one of the transformative phenomena of our time: the emergence of the social web. Broad in reach and appeal, it will interest readers who want to think about web-based social platforms in a new light and gain new insights about social media." --Toby Stuart, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley "Rich in analysis and information, A Social Strategy provides a timely and very insightful view about why some social media platforms succeed and others fail--and why some digital marketing strategies do better than others. The book's arguments are supported by an impressive array of quantitative and qualitative evidence and its ideas have the potential to become central to understanding social media." --Martin Gargiulo, INSEAD Asia

Author Biography

Miko?aj Jan ("Misiek") Piskorski is professor of strategy and innovation at IMD Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland. Previously, he was an associate professor of business administration in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School, where he wrote numerous case studies on how companies can use social media platforms to improve their competitive advantage.

Table of Contents

Preface vii 1. The Arc of the Book 1 2. Social Failures and Social Solutions 9 3. "Meet" Solutions: eHarmony and OkCupid 25 4. "Meet" Solution: Twitter 49 5. "Friend" Solutions: Facebook and mixi 68 6. "Meet" and "Friend" Solutions: LinkedIn and Friendster 90 7. "Meet" and "Friend" Solution: MySpace 120 8. Social Strategies 137 9. Social Strategy at Zynga 151 10. Social Strategy at Yelp 170 11. Social Strategy at American Express 184 12. Social Strategy at Nike 205 13. Building Social Strategy at XCard and Harvard Business Review 220 14. Conclusions 249 Acknowledgments 257 Notes 259 References 263 Index 267

Review

Winner of the 2015 Gold Medal in Networking, Axiom Business Book Awards "Piskorski's thought-provoking and well-researched title is ground-breaking and should be required reading for those in business, and business faculty and students."--Lucy Heckman, Library Journal (starred review) "For companies that are struggling to measure social media, Piskorski offers a different way of looking at the problem, and his three tests--the social utility test, the social solution test and the business value test--provide a way to check if a project is working."--Maija Palmer, Financial Times "Whoever thinks using social media successfully (i.e., making money from it) is easy needs to think again. So do people who think it's all one big fad or that creating a successful social media campaign is just blind luck. And that's where Mikolaj Jan Piskorski and his book A Social Strategy: How We Profit from Social Media come in."--Catherine Ramsdell, PopMatters "A highly informative and insightful analysis of web-based social platforms that should command the attention of sociologists, psychologists and lay readers as well as bottom-line businessmen and women."--Glenn C. Altschuler, Psychology Today "Thanks to Mikolaj Jan Piskorski and his new book, companies now have a clear strategic framework for figuring out how to tap into their power."--Theodore Kinney, Strategy + Business "The author's research offers new insights into the reasons for the explosion of social media."--Choice "The beauty of this book is that it is not only informative to scholars, but also applicable for business practitioners."--Yongsheng Wang, International Social Science Review "Social platforms are here to stay, and companies that successfully leverage these platforms as part of their social strategy are more likely to achieve competitive advantage. Empirical research is needed to establish specific mechanisms behind these processes and their outcomes. Piskorski's book provides a fruitful conceptual foundation for such research."--Olga Khessina, Administrative Science Quarterly

Prizes

Winner of Gold Medal in Networking, Axiom Business Book Awards 2015

Long Description

Almost no one had heard of social media a decade ago, but today websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have more than 1 billion users and account for almost 25 percent of Internet use. Practically overnight, social media seems indispensable to our lives--from friendship and dating to news and business. What makes social media so different from traditional media? Answering that question is the key to making social media work for any business, argues Miko?aj Piskorski, one of the world's leading experts on the business of social media. In A Social Strategy, he provides the most convincing answer yet, one backed by original research, data, and case studies from companies such as Nike and American Express. Drawing on his analysis of proprietary data from social media sites, Piskorski argues that the secret of successful ones is that they allow people to fulfill social needs that either can't be met offline or can be met only at much greater cost. This insight provides the key to how companies can leverage social platforms to create a sustainable competitive advantage.Companies need to help people interact with each other before they will promote products to their friends or help companies in other ways. Done right, a company's social media should benefit customers and the firm. Piskorski calls this "a social strategy," and he describes how companies such as Yelp and Zynga have done it. Groundbreaking and important, A Social Strategy provides not only a story- and data-driven explanation for the explosion of social media but also an invaluable, concrete road map for any company that wants to tap the marketing potential of this remarkable phenomenon.

Review Quote

Winner of the 2015 Gold Medal in Networking, Axiom Business Book Awards

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