Coffee House Book Review – “Wikibrands” by Sean Moffitt and Mike Dover

In the second edition of this series, I’ll be reviewing the book “Wikibrands: Reinventing Your Company In a Customer-Driven Marketplace”, which examines the issue of brand marketing in this social media age, as well as providing a blueprint for organizations to help them navigate and showcase their brand in this increasingly noisier communications world.

Now, for those who think branding is merely an issue that marketers or your marketing department needs to worry about, I suggest you read this recent piece of mine where I discuss the growing shift in organizational branding to reflect an organization’s culture and purpose, and why leaders need to have their eyes, hands and mind deeply involved in this subject.

In their book, Moffitt and Dover define wikibrands as “a progressive set of organizations, products, services, ideas, and causes that tap into the powers of customer participation, social influence, and collaboration to drive business value”.

The first few chapters of this book are understandably spent providing readers with an overview of how social media is changing both the face of business and how businesses conduct their affairs. Specifically, how organizations are shifting their customer-directed interactions from simply broadcasting to their target audience, to engaging in a conversational, and at times collaborative, interaction with their customers to increase the value their organization provides.

For regular users of the various social media channels, the ideas and points presented in these early chapters are not anything new or surprising. However, it does provide a good backdrop for leaders who are still unsure of the role social media will play in how their organizations operate.

Where the book really gets interesting is when the authors begin to discuss their “FLIRT model”. The FLIRT model comprises of five key elements the authors regard as being vital to successfully creating a wikibrand for any organization:

1. Focus
2. Language and content
3. Incentives, motivations, and outreach
4. Rules, guidelines, and rituals
5. Tools and platforms

Over the course of these chapters, the authors discuss where the focus of your efforts should be, what you need to communicate to your audience and how, using incentives which offer an intrinsic, extrinsic and/or explicit motivation, and bridging the connections between rituals and purpose.

It’s also in these chapters that we see how the process of creating a wikibrand addresses many of the objectives or goals leaders have to engage and empower their workforce, if not also encouraging employees to take an active role in helping to shape and define their organization’s purpose.

In one of the examples the authors share in their book, they point out how at IBM, internal research has shown that employees who are encouraged by their organization’s leadership to collaborate in defining their company’s brand “are more willing to contribute to the company’s success, to meet new people and to expand their global network. They are also able to access expertise more easily wherever it exists”.

In another example, Moffitt and Dover point out how the efforts of one hotel in New York City to create a brand community through online engagement has increased the level of pride their employees feel about their contributions – whether they’re the front-desk concierge or the housekeeping staff – because they can see the impact their efforts have on the perception and value of their hotel’s brand.

There are, of course, several other examples, but I think these ones help to illustrate the importance organizational branding is going to play in a leader’s ability to rally their team around a shared goal. On a side note, it was refreshing to see that this book tended to employ many lesser-known examples of companies that demonstrate the benefits of creating a wikibrand for their organizations, including many Canadian firms.

In the end, “Wikibrands” turned out to be not only a practical guide on how organizations can adapt their brand to meet the growing expectations for more open and transparent interactions, it also serves as a timely warning for businesses to recognize that they can no longer expect to control how their brand is perceived, either by employees or by their target audience.

Indeed, as the authors point out, “as organizations become more transparent, the core associations emanating from a brand will increasingly be derived from the firm’s own internal philosophy and business dealings. This may be problematic for companies with skeletons in the closet or whose portfolios contain brands with competing values”.

Of course, the push for greater transparency is far from being a doom-and-gloom scenario for the business world. Indeed, throughout the book, the authors provide numerous examples not only demonstrating how many businesses are successfully engaging their audience online, but of how both their employees and their business are thriving because of it.

To paraphrase one executive quoted in the book, businesses today shouldn’t be thinking that they’re simply selling transactions; instead, they should view themselves as being in the business of fostering interactions/relationships with both their customers and employees.

As such, regardless of whether your a seasoned marketer or a front-line manager for a team of computer programmers, “Wikibrands” can serve as a valuable guide not only for how businesses will inevitably change in the years ahead, but how your organization can manage this change with minimal disruption or loss of market share.

You can buy “Wikibrands” on Amazon.com or Amazon.ca for Canadian readers.