Social Nation: How to Harness the Power of Social Media to Attract Customers, Motivate Employees, and Grow Your Business

Preface

	You make a living by what you get. You make a life by what you give.
	--Winston Churchill

About 15 years ago my wife, Ellen, started asking me, "Why don't businesses get it?" She would come home from work, sit across the dinner table from me, and say, "Why don't they understand that organizations depend more on their communities, not their products and services, for enduring success?" At the time, she was the dean of students at Harvard Dental School and was troubled by the fact that students were not viewed as a community of contributors that could help reinvent the school, curriculum or fund raising activities.

"At Harvard, they spend a lot of time talking about how much money they have under management," Ellen would tell me. "They talk about how many buildings they own. They talk about the number of tenured faciulty, their research grants, and almost everything except the community of students and their interactions.

Ever since she said that to me, I've paid close attention to how organizations operate and what they really manage and measure—revenues from products and services versus information from customer and employee communities and their interactions. And the bottom line is that I realized Ellen was right.

Businesses cared more about assets and money, than they did people and their relationships. They couldn't remember the names of their customers and employees and didn't ...