Humanize Book Review

The presentation that was on Thursday was a little boring by my opinion. The authors didn’t catch me with anything that you don’t just read on the internet or any new information or ideas that might be “new” and “innovative”. I’ve been in the Business program in Northeastern for 3 years now and have been to the book presentations every year. I thought that this year’s book and presentation, where it had the right idea of social media, was not catchy enough. Last year they had someone that created educational games and was able to implement it with thousands of people and businesses. The social media even though it is newer subject have been now implemented in a lot of businesses. The company that I work for has their Facebook page and has a program for the phone but so do many more. First on stage came Maddie Grant who is one of the authors of the book. She gave some background information on how she met with the other author Jamie Notter. They met in Chicago in 2007 at a business conference actually. She gave two good examples from the book – the “Motrin Mom” commercial which implied that having your baby on your back or caring it around gives you backaches which Motrin resolves of course. A lot of mothers didn’t agree with the idea and thought of it as a bad commercial which they spread all over blogs, Facebook and twitter. Soon enough the healthcare company had to issue an apology to them, because of all the bad press that was spread so quick over the internet. Another example was the guitar guy that United took for granted. United broke his guitar and he made a song about it, which spread over the internet in few days. They not only issued an apology but paid him back for it. He tried to resolve the issue quietly by just complaining to the company but they told him they are not at fault and are not paying for it so he took it to the internet. Those are examples of bad press through the internet. People now have more power than ever before when it comes to opinion and being able to express themselves. The book talked about companies being more open, trustworthy and generative. In order for today’s companies to prosper and stay at the top, they have to be more open with the public. Companies that try to hide or keep information private do not fit anymore in today’s society and where they can keep their secrets it is good to release and trust that the people will see them for what they are. Where everyone makes mistakes if you try to fix them people (employees, customers, competitors) will trust you more, which leads to the second point in the book – trustworthy. Social media lets us create, share, learn and collaborate so use that for your company’s advantage. There were two points that Jamie made that he noticed when he had meetings in different companies. Companies had issues with agility and engagement. They do not know how to make their employees be engaged in their work. 1 in 3 employees are engaged and the others hate going to work or don’t even care about it. That could hurt a company a lot and if they are not engaged in what they do then it doesn’t work for them and the company. The second statement was agility. Companies cannot keep up with the customers and innovations that lately seems to be flying around us. When we think that when a man landed on the moon, the computer that they used to track that can do about a hundredth less than that of what a smart phone can do today. Again where they had good ideas in the humanize book, it seems to me that it is few years behind. They didn’t have any visuals or interactions with the group and where they seemed to know what Jamie and Maddie were talking about it didn’t seem up to date.