1. The Benevolent Dictator: Empower Your Employees, Build Your Business and Outwit the Competition
Have you ever wondered what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur? Starting a company seems so effortless for some people. Voilà! They build it, and people come. What’s the secret? Is there one? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps it all comes down to how you manage it. Note: While this book is written for the entrepreneur, the lessons found inside are valuable to everyone who works in business.

Michael Feuer, founder of OfficeMax, shares 40 lessons on empowering your employees, building your business, and outwitting the competition in his new book, The Benevolent Dictator.

Some of my favorite lessons:

• Lesson #2: The Best Ideas Can Come from What’s Right Under Your Nose
• Lesson #7: Don’t Underestimate the Power of Focus, Discipline, and Follow-Up
• Lesson #11: Always Be Prepared with Plan B … And Sometimes C and D
• Lesson #13: Never Be as Weak as Your Weakest Link
• Lesson #16: Managing People Is About Achieving Objectives Through Others
• Lesson #23: Don’t Drink Your Own Bathwater—You Could Choke

2. Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life Without Losing Its Soul
Onward is the story of Starbucks after former CEO Howard Schultz came back in 2008 to stabilize and save his beloved brand. The challenge he put forth was to refocus on core values all while fending off harsh critics and hungry competitors.

Starbucks is a customer-centric company, and this book shows how its core values allow it to be so. Themes include: Magic, Loyalty, Believe, Nimble, Innovate, Balance, Conviction, and Conscience.

How often do you hear these words in business? Not very!

3. Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization
If you’ve worked in corporate America long enough, you know one thing exists: Silos. Tribes aren’t silos. Tribes are how groups naturally form within organizations and they may be cross-functional, cross-department. With Tribal Leadership, Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright show you how to embrace the natural tribes in an organization.

Tribal Leadership can be gained through five stages:

• Stage1: On the Verge of a Meltdown (“Life Sucks”)
• Stage 2: Disconnected and Disengaged (“My Life Sucks”)
• Stage 3: The Wild, Wild West (“I’m Great”)
• Stage 4: Establishing Tribal Leadership (“We’re Great”)
• Stage 5: Toward Vital Work Communities (“Life is Great”)

What’s great about this book is that it addresses three different levels: The Main Story, Technical Notes, and Coaching Tips.

4. Social Marketing to the Business Customer: Listen to Your B2B Market, Generate Major Account Leads, and Build Client Relationships
If you’ve been investigating social media for your business, you’ll find one thing for sure: a shortage of books that address social media for B2B companies. Paul Gillin and Eric Schwartzman aim to help B2B  marketers understand today’s marketing, the need to be social and how to best allocate social media resources—resources that are often limited.

Topics include:

• The Changing Rules of B2B Marketing
• Creating a Social Organization
• Learning by Listening
• Understanding Search (SEO)
• Lead Generation
• Profiting from Communities
• Return on Investment

You may keep hearing that social media is free or there isn’t any ROI in social media, Paul and Eric debunk both of these myths and with a lot of B2B examples!

5. Measure What Matters: Online Tools For Understanding Customers, Social Media, Engagement, and Key Relationships
Katie Payne’s first book on measurement, Measuring Public Relationships: The Data-Driven Communicator’s Guide to Success, is a standard desk reference book for me. When I had the chance to read her latest book, I leaped at the chance.

The book kicks off with dispelling some ROI myths that are deeply engrained in business:

• Measurement is Expensive
• You Can’t Measure the ROI, so Why Bother?
• Measurement is Strictly Quantitative
• Measurement is Something You Do When a Program Is Over
• I Know What’s Happening: I Don’t Need Research

If you or anyone on your team has quietly thought this or muttered any of it out loud, Measure What Matters is a must read.

Key topics include: Seven Steps to Perfect Measurement; Yes, You Can Afford to Measure; How to Measure in a Social Media World; and Measuring Relationships with Your Community.

6. Reputation Rules: Strategies for Building Your Company’s Most Valuable Asset
Are you really paying attention to your reputation? Is there a core team focused on it? In Reputation Rules, Daniel Diermeyer, Ph.D. debunks some closely held values when it comes to reputation management. If you believe that a good reputation flows from good business practices or reputation management is common sense, it might be time for you and your company to rethink how you look at managing your reputation in today’s business environment. It’s simply not enough to throw any issues or crises over the fence to your public relations team.

Using business examples from Bank of America, Shell UK, Mercedes, AIG, and Walmart. Core chapters include:

• Beyond the Obvious
• The Decisive Moment and How To Miss It
• Brand Management Beyond Customers
• Perks, Scandals, and Moral Outrage
• Strategic Management of Reputational Risk
• Values, Culture, and the Teachable Moment

This book should only be read by management teams that are serious about protecting, maintaining or restoring their reputation.

7. Curation Nation: How to Win in a World Where Consumers are Creators
What happens when there is too much content to get through and digest? Steven Rosenbaum leads the way in helping businesses get focused on content that provides quality and context. If you are living in the digital world already, Curation Nation is not only a must read—it’s the future.

What is curation? According to Steven, it’s two things:

“Adding value from humans who add their qualitative judgment to whatever is being gathered and organized” and it’s “amateur and professional.” A curator’s job isn’t to create more content, but to make sense of the content that others have created.

I’ve curated some of the topics included in Curation Nation for you. (Sorry! I couldn’t resist.):

• Big-Time Curators on the Rise
• Consumers, Conversations and Curation
• Content Entrepreneurs
• Tools and Techniques
• Naysayers
• Brands: Curating Your Consumer
• Networks: Writing Inside a Curated Community
• Are Content Aggregators Vampires?

Happy reading!

Let me know what you think!

Disclaimer: While I did pick each book due to their subject matter, I must note that I received them at no cost. The Benevolent Dictator, Onward, and Tribal Leadership were received from literary agent Kevin Small. Social Marketing was received from co-author Eric Schwartzman. Measure What Matters was won in a competition hosted by Zoetica. And last, but not least, Reputation Rules and Curation Nation were received from McGraw-Hill as part of their blogger outreach. Receiving these books for free in no way changes my review as they are topics that I am passionate about … and I would have bought them anyway.

Advertising agency founder David Ogilvy once defined a brand as the intangible sum of attributes, such as name, packaging, price, history, and reputation. However, with a $2 trillion dollar mess still looming from the 2008 financial crisis, “Main Street” rage bubbling over financial bailouts of large institutions and minimal credit supplied by financial firms (despite interest rates at all time lows), there is much for financial companies to do in terms of brand repair.

In the United States, the finance industry still supplies a significant portion of gross domestic product. With so many people employed by the finance industry, and the importance of credit to an economic system, it is certainly in the industry’s best interest to restore consumer trust. Enclosed are two steps (there may be more) towards this effort.

Realize Perceived Shortcuts Are Rarely Shortcuts

A wise teacher once counseled that “anything worth doing is worth doing right.” This is a lesson that the finance industry has continually failed to learn. James Surowiecki from The New Yorker points out in “Back Office Blues” that banks have created another PR mess that could have been easily avoided. He says, “(Banks) have foreclosed on homes without having the proper documentation and (instead) relied on unqualified people to sign affidavits attesting to things they didn’t know. In a few cases, they seem to have actually tossed people who didn’t have mortgages out of their homes.” And now, Surowiecki notes, “As a result, federal regulators and attorney generals in all 50 states are now investigating.”

The costs saved by employing minimally qualified personnel to daily sign thousands of foreclosure documents will likely be dwarfed by litigation costs and an eventual settlement that could range in the billions. Surowiecki continues, “Banks have preferred to do things on the cheap, which is an open invitation to trouble, including fraud.” Indeed, cutting corners to save a buck, in most instances ends up costing two.

Consider Health Before Wealth

In a letter to the editor of the Financial Times, dated Nov. 9, 2010, twenty professors from prominent universities, such as Stanford, MIT, and Berkeley, openly criticized regulatory reform passed by most advanced economies. “Banks high leverage and the resulting fragility and systemic risk contributed to the near collapse of the financial system,” they wrote. The authors suggest that higher capital requirements—or a buffer against volatile markets—are in order to ensure a healthier banking system, rather than focusing on “high returns for banks’ shareholders and managers, with taxpayers picking up the losses and economies suffering the fall-out.”

A healthy banking system is still one that takes risks, but also has an appropriate capital buffer for turbulent times. Holding a sufficient capital buffer makes it less likely the financial system will need another taxpayer bailout. Ultimately, better risk management strategies will help renew trust in the banking system.

When asked about qualifications needed to obtain credit, JP Morgan famously replied, “The first thing (needed) is character … Because a man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom.” What suggestions do you have for the finance industry to restore its reputation?

Related: Reputation Management—Not Needed Until It’s Needed

In an article from “The Observer,” John Naughton wonders in amazement at how society ever managed without the Internet. Naughton ponders a world without Google, Skype, instant messaging, and online bank accounts. And while the Internet has created boom for most of us, the rise of social media hasn’t been sweet ambrosia for all companies. In fact, with social media and Internet technologies, now company decisions and actions are mostly public, including those of front-line employees. Now, actions that happened last week, last night, or 10 minutes ago can be broadcast across the globe in seconds, creating very dangerous challenges for company branding and reputation efforts.

In the Financial Times article “Perils of a Tarnished Brand,” authors Morgen Witzel and Ravi Mattu notice that even the most scripted and orchestrated product launches can go haywire. And even when “best-intented” marketing plans are well-executed, companies can be exposed to the ramifications of their daily operational and strategic decisions (e.g., Google in China and BP). “What affects reputations, in turn affects brands,” the authors point out.

Every employee is a brand ambassador, and brand management is no longer simply the purview of marketing managers. Even the best branding intentions can go awry when actions don’t back up corporate speak, say Witzel and Mattu.

Of larger concern however, is marketing cost-cutting trends in the name of efficiency that potentially leave brands and reputations exposed.

Robert Mabro, Honorary President of Oxford’s Institute for Energy, describes this problem in a letter to the Financial Times. He writes, “(Companies) no longer want to employ specialists in soft matters, such as political issues and the like. When an accident occurs, they find themselves hopelessly unprepared. This of course (ends up) destroying shareholder value!” Moreover, economist John Kay sums up the problem quite succinctly, “Yesterday’s cost-savings are so often today’s corporate crisis.”

One potential solution is for companies to invest more in “softer matters” like brand, reputation, crisis and risk management. Undoubtedly, some of these considerations are tough to justify in an age of narrow return on investment marketing calculations such as cost per lead.

However, Internet and social media technologies that transmit events, news and crisis accounts—at the speed of light—aren’t going away. To succeed in such an environment, companies must invest in the softer functions mentioned above even when “payback” doesn’t appear imminent.

It’s difficult to forecast all types of crises that could occur. A much better plan is preparedness. Is your company up for the challenge?

Related: Financial Times “It Pays to Expect the Unexpected“

My hypothesis going into the creation of these questions was that B2B marketers (including yours truly) just aren’t adequately prepared for an online reputation crisis. Dell wasn’t, Wal-Mart wasn’t. If those big B2C brands weren’t ready, I was betting we weren’t ready either. And I was right!
To be totally transparent with you, I wasn’t surprised by many of the responses to my survey. The bulk of you are monitoring your reputation in some way, shape or form. But are you poised to respond in the case of an online reputation crisis? 55% admitted you weren’t.
Perhaps you need stronger guidelines in place, like a blogging policy. Two-thirds of respondents don’t have one!
Many of you are do-it-yourselfers when it comes to monitoring your reputation. Is that perhaps because your company hasn’t made this a strategic priority? 53% admitted it wasn’t a strategic priority for you …. yet!
My goal here is to give you the state of the union when it comes to monitoring reputations online. This data is bound to change, so I hope I get you thinking of ways to close the gap with your organization’s reputation!
Click here to download the free research report
Special thanks to my sponsors …. Trackur.com, run by the renowned Andy Beal of the blog MarketingPilgrim.com, and Marketing Profs’ equally renowned Ann Handley for their support on this survey.

Strategies for understanding and dealing with the flow of all these conversations are the natural next step. As more and more conversations are coming online, you need to respond quickly. So knowing things like “sentiment,” who in your organization is on point to respond, and whether they have been doing so are becoming more important. It’s like being at a party and having several conversations going on that you want to participate in.
I met Michael Spataro a few weeks back as I was researching tools to help me with this exact problem. I think what I found out was important for you to hear as well. I hope you agree.


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About Mike
Mike is vice president with Visible Technologies, a leading provider of social media analytics and online reputation management services. An early pioneer of interactive marketing and PR, Mike has been devising and implementing digital communications and social media strategies for global brands for more than 10 years, including The Walt Disney Co., General Motors, Panasonic, Hewlett-Packard, MasterCard, Eastman Kodak, Verizon, Hanes, and the renowned “Got Milk?” campaign.
Prior to joining Visible, Mike led the interactive and new media divisions for Interpublic’s two largest PR agencies, Weber Shandwick and GolinHarris. He was the strategic force that established both agencies as leaders in digital communications and consumer-generated media services. During his nearly 10 years at Interpublic, Mike created and executed a variety of award-winning campaigns that blended traditional and new media ideas that produced outstanding business results for his clients.

Since consumers rely heavily on the Web as an authoritative source of information, managing a brand’s online reputation has become a top priority for companies. Here are 5 tips that could help you avoid a major disaster and reduce the risk of a flogging in the blogosphere.
Tip 1: Monitor the New Conversational Terrain
You have to be listening. As Woody Allen said, “half of the battle is just showing up.” Create a custom feed based on keyword searches using tools like Technorati, Feedster, IceRocket and news.googlecom.
Tip 2: Measure
Agencies like Nielsen BuzzMetrics and TNS Cymfony (trackback to a podcast on how to measure the blogosphere) have more advanced tools for monitoring social networks, blogs and communities. They also can measure the volume of buzz, track the sources and gauge the emotion of the content, be it positive, negative or just sarcastic.
Tip 3: Engage
If you don’t join the conversation, you have no control. We’ll say it again: hope is not a strategy. Tools like BuzzLogic can give you a picture of a blogger, as well as the influencers that surround any given blog. Also sites like BlogInluence.net and SocialMeter.com can provide a snapshot of any blogger’s street cred.
Tip 4: Buy Keywords?
Yes. If you do end up with a firestorm surrounding your company or brand, why not buy keywords and get your story told? Jim Nail from Cymfony says “for a company to protect its brand, they should be buying keywords.” Consider Wal-Mart as the classic example. “Wal-Mart Sucks” yields negative results for the first 10 listings. So why not own those keywords as paid links to sites that put Wal-Mart in perspective, covering, among other things, the company’s substantial economic benefits to society?
Tip 5: Use PR to Strengthen Your Digital Footprint
Another obvious tactic would be to issue a series of press statements to address whatever the concerns are, and optimize them for the Web. Consider using a press release distribution company such as PRWeb, which sends releases to journalists’ email boxes and makes them Web ready. This will help increase the rankings in news engines such as Google News, as well as in the general search results. When a press release ranks high in a search engine, it’s just one more spot a negative listing won’t appear!
BONUS – why not take my Reputation Management for New Media survey which will give you a sense of how ready your organization is for a reputation disaster? If you leave me your email I will send the results back to you in about a month.

Managing a company’s reputation used to be a back-channel activity, known only to a few. Today, company reputation is available to everyone. It is radically transparent.
Fellow blogger Andy Beal of MarketingPilgrim just released a book with Dr. Judy Strauss titled Radically Transparent. It’s a how-to guide for anyone needing to manage a reputation, whether B2B, B2C or even C2C. To complement the book, Andy has launched a service called Trackur that can help you monitor and manage a reputation.
I managed to grab Andy on his way to SXSW to discuss what’s changing in reputation management. Enjoy …

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About Andy
Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant specializing in search engine marketing, online reputation management, and business blogging. Considered one of the world’s most respected online marketing experts, Andy has worked with many top companies such as Motorola, GlaxoSmithKline, SAS, Lowes, Quicken Loans, and NBC.
Highly respected as a source of internet marketing advice, Andy Beal has had articles published around the world, including BusinessWeek Online, Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Guide, and Web Pro News. He is the co-author of an online reputation management book called Radically Transparent which can be found on Amazon.com.

But all this great awareness can come crashing down on you with one reputation disaster online.
Good and bad reputations are opposite sides of the brand coin. And the ability of consumers today to share their opinions of your brand with just a click of a mouse levels the playing field for all and puts your brand in constant peril.
A solid reputation reflects the partners you do business with, the strength of your management team, your company’s financial performance to date and, ultimately, the types of employees you hire and will hire in the future. But literally millions of customers and prospects engage in social communities on the Web today. Facebook alone has 50 million community members, with over half of them logging in daily! Couple that with the ease and ability to create a quick video or podcast, or post a negative comment on a blog, and you have a recipe for reputation disaster.
Unfortunately, when a reputation disaster occurs, it is becoming more difficult for your PR team to execute using the usual crisis management playbook, because the type of media, placement of media and approach to each medium differs. This fragmentation means it will become increasingly difficult to neutralize criticism and restore reputations when something happens.
Additionally, the Internet already has built-in, automatic reputation ranking systems. Currently examples are Google for companies and eBay for vendors. These ranking engines are quickly becoming extremely effective ways for people to determine how reputable your company is before deciding whether to do business with you.
The bottom line: As media continue to fragment with the explosion of yet more social networks, aggregators like Google will become increasingly important in helping users decide whether or not to do business with you.
So what is a company to do?
I recommend a three-step approach to reputation management called “MRO”:
1) Monitor …. Companies should designate an employee or hire an external service to monitor, moderate and drive positive discussions.
2) Respond …. Technical staff should be designated to respond to any product or support issues that arise from communities and take the lead in responding with action plans to any negative sentiments that develop.
3) Optimize …. Companies need to proactively optimize their reputation online over time by exploiting the positive aspects of their brand (an example here is GE, whose Ecomagination is demonstrating the company’s commitment to keeping the environment clean).
Each MRO element is designed to give you a point person for this reputation-protection trifecta:
Monitor gives you a way to see and engage in conversations before they get out of control. People will be a lot more polite online when they know you are listening. The challenge is learning about conversations that arise quickly. This is where you need reputation bulldogs, who can be out there watching all the time.
Respond gives you a dedicated point person internally who can talk about your product or service with authority and provide clarity on how you might resolve an issue. As I said above, this should be a technical person rather than a communications person. This will convey the company’s commitment to address the issue.
And finally, Optimize. Optimizing your reputation in the marketplace means you go beyond just keeping it on track. You invest in the online aspects of your reputation just as you invest in other dimensions of your brand.
Having a strong brand doesn’t mean you have a strong reputation. Ignoring this critical factor is a risk that companies can’t afford to take today.

On the flip side of that, there is another group also emerging …. reputation gamers. Reputation gamers are abusing the very reputation management systems responsible for our digital lifestyle such as Google, Del.icio.us, eBay and Digg, etc.
Here is an example of such activity:
Digg is a site where its members can submit articles, along with a short description and a link, in the Digg system. Other members look through these articles and choose either to “digg” or “bury” stories. Articles with the most “diggs” make it onto the site’s widely read front page.
One reputation gamer’s method of choice was the so-called Sybil attack. Named after the famous case of a woman with 16 personalities, a Sybil attack occurs when an individual opens multiple accounts and has them all recommend the same article. If it gets enough votes, the story could make it to the front page of Digg, with a huge payoff.
Getting on the Digg front page is equivalent to a front page story in a major publication, drawing millions of readers who have the potential to catapult a story to the top of a Google search. If the Digg site has advertisers, it could be a financial windfall. If the site sells something – say a widget or a T-shirt – the rewards can be even greater!
Where’s the Buzz? First of all, let me be clear – I do not recommend this type of activity. The Web 2.0 world is meant to operate in a self-policing way, much like Wikipedia. Marketers who go down the Sybil attack or a similar path should beware their reputation as a marketer is at stake. As for the sites themselves, I guess we need to think, perhaps worry, about the reputation of the reputation management systems themselves!