Empowered

Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler offer plenty of interesting viewpoints on how companies leverage technology and social media to better service customers in Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers and Transform Your Business.

The book is more than a compendium of bullet-listed tips and tricks and lessons. It stands out, first, because it's data-driven and draws from Forrester Research's Technographics surveys on technology usage (the authors are from Forrester), and, second, because of concise case studies provided about successful employee and customer empowerment. Two noteworthy chapters provide a statistical overview of customer word-of-mouth through social media channels (Chapter 3) and elaborate upon safety and security principles for corporate social media adoption (Chapter 12).

It isn't easy to find material on business and social media with less of the rah-rah-rah enthusiasm for enthusiasm's sake and more to offer in terms of sober and helpful analysis. Empowered falls squarely among the latter.