Eric Jensen

Book Review: The Net­work is Your Cus­tomer — 5 Strate­gies to Thrive in a Dig­i­tal Age by David L. Rogers (@David_Rogers ) When I first picked up this book by David Rogers, (a pro­fes­sor at Colum­bia Busi­ness School), I thought it was yet another intro­duc­tion to social com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nolo­gies for wary cor­po­rate man­agers. Boy, was I wrong! What’s dif­fer­ent… Rather than orga­niz­ing the book around the use of spe­cific social com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools or an exam­i­na­tion of the gen­eral the­ory of dis­rup­tive social tech­nolo­gies, Rogers builds his book around the behav­iors and needs of cus­tomer net­works. The title is quite apt. The writ­ing is acces­si­ble and the book is very well orga­nized and designed to be prac­ti­cal. The first two chap­ters explain the dynam­ics of cus­tomer net­works and social com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nolo­gies. Each of the 5 behav­iors he iden­ti­fies are exam­ined in their own chap­ters and mul­ti­ple strate­gies are pre­sented. Next, Rogers ded­i­cates a chap­ter to a spe­cific plan­ning and imple­men­ta­tion process that will help busi­nesses apply these ideas to their spe­cific sit­u­a­tions. He then asks the ques­tions, “What will the orga­ni­za­tion of the future look like?”and “How do we cre­ate an orga­ni­za­tion that is not just customer-focused, but customer-network focused?” Finally, he sys­tem­at­i­cally reviews each of the strate­gies in the book, by ask­ing a series of ques­tions in a ‘Self-Assessment Quiz’. Inquiry is a pow­er­ful tech­nique for self-reflection, per­son­al­iz­ing the ideas pre­sented here. There are well over 100 case stud­ies spread through­out the book. Com­pa­nies are listed in an Appen­dix, sorted by indus­try. Each case study specif­i­cally illustrates…