Who has time to read books? We all should, but it's tough to know what is worth reading. Each week, this blog will spotlight a new book relevant for marketers or people in business with ideas worth learning and sharing. Through a combination of a personal interview with the Authors, and short review – you'll get the basic premise of the book and why you might want to read it. To recommend a book to be featured, send an email pitch to influentialmarketing@gmail.com.
This week's featured book is Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business, a follow up from the co-author of the best selling research-based overview of social media – Groundswell.
THE INTERVIEW (Thoughts from Josh Bernoff):
1. What inspired you to write Empowered?
After talking to hundreds of companies, I figured out that the real challenge was not just what to do about social, but how to do social within the context of a company.
2. What is the big idea of the book?
Customers are more empowered than ever, and move quickly. The only way to keep up with them is to empower your own employees to solve their problems. This means anyone within a company – in marketing, in sales, in support – must be empowered to create technology solutions.
3. Who is the perfect person to read this book?
Managers in any department – marketing, support, IT, HR, senior executives – who want to know how to run their companies in the age of the empowered consumer.
THE 30 SECOND REVIEW (Why You Should Read It):
When Groundswell (Bernoff's first book) was first published (the same week as my own book, Personality Not Included), the title struck me as brilliant, because it assigned a broader meaning to a term that more and more people were using everyday. Social technologies were indeed leading to groundswells around the world, and those groundswells were changing industries and lives. With this latest book, Josh has once again managed to corral a term that may be familiar to us all, and give it a much deeper context and meaning. Not that the title is the only thing to learn from in Empowered – the book itself is a heavy hitter when it comes to taking Forrester's trademark research driven approach and making a case for how empowering your employees and customers can be the most transformative thing you do for your business. If your experience is like mine, you'll find the plentiful data and case study examples to be compelling – but what will really excite you is just how much the ammunition the book will offer you to make the case for empowering employees and customers to the rest of the world. (Review written by Rohit Bhargava)
LINKS AND MORE INFORMATION:
Official Book Website: https://www.forrester.com/empowered
Author's Website: https://bernoff.com
REVIEW PHILOSOPHY (Why This Review Matters):
All the books that are reviewed in this series are worth your time. That's why you won't find any negative book reviews on this blog. As an Author myself, I have hundreds of book on my shelf and have researched hundreds more. I get many invitations to preview books and choose just one every week to share here on this blog. Read my other book reviews at https://rohitbhargava.com/book-reviews/.
Hi Rohit,
If you liked this, try Brian Solis and Engage. Another great read.
Ivan