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Why you can’t fake authenticity in “The Now Revolution”

Serendipity has a funny way of delivering us extraordinary treats.

It happened yesterday when I was reading The Now Revolution, a new book on social media by Jay Baer and Amber Naslund. The Now Revolution is an amalgam of the bottom-up management found in The Rudolph Factor, Zappo’s uber-company-culture tome, Delivering Happiness, and Chris Brogan’s Trust Agents. This social media primer provides actionable steps you can take to make real-time business work for you, rather than against you.

With social media and the connected consumer, you can’t feign passion, fake authenticity, and be complacent.

Here’s how I inadvertently put Jay to that very test.

A unique feature in the book are QR codes that you can scan with your PDA, which then immediately transport you to greater online content. I downloaded the Microsoft Tag app. on my iPhone and scanned the tag on page 16 for “The Culture Barometer;” a quiz that helps you determine the “social” culture within your organization.

But the tag kept taking me to The Now Revolution Facebook page. After three attempts, and being new to the technology, I reached out to Jay on Facebook about the errant link suggesting that it might be user error. Within five minutes, he responded  thanking me for the alert. He made a quick adjustment to the URL, and asked me to try it again. Voila!

This is The Now Revolution at work. When else could you immediately reach an author, point out a business challenge, and have it fixed within minutes? And it didn’t cost the publisher thousands of dollars in reprints and weeks of wasted time. Plus, this customer (me) became an even more active participant in the product and brand: an amazing example of the new velocity of commerce.

I jokingly suggested to Jay that he embedded this snafu to demonstrate the premise of the book: “7 shifts to make your company smarter, faster and more social.”

I’m going to miss Jay and Amber

But you don’t have to. This Friday, you can meet the authors at the Social Media Arizona event at Madcap Theaters in Tempe, AZ. I’ll be in Omaha. But if I was in the crowd, and after reading The Now Revolution, I’d ask:

1. I can appreciate the pragmatic use of QR codes for companies and causes that can deliver meaningful content. But how can marketers avoid making them annoying promotional gimmicks, and therefore diluting the technology’s credibility?
2. What level of manager or executive typically drives the cultural shift needed for large organizations to adopt social media?
3. Besides Yammer, what are the top three internal social media platforms, and have you heard what SharePoint is doing in this space?
4. Who is moving faster to learn, adopt, and activate B2B social media: Ad agencies, PR firms, or internal corporate communicators?
5. What is the single greatest fear an organization must overcome to be successful with social media?

If you haven’t ignited your own social revolution inside your company, then the time is NOW to start by attending SMAZ.