IT Management Slideshow:
Social Media: Seven Ways to Make it Work at Work

If your company is like many others, you’re already exploring social media. But are these efforts providing real value? Or is social media perceived as more like a novelty -- interesting enough, occasionally amusing but ultimately disconnected from the delivery of business-focused outcomes? The book, The Social Organization: How to Use Social Media to Tap the Collective Genius of Your Customers and Employees (Harvard Business Review Press/available now), reveals what CIOs and other senior executives must understand about social media to maximize its potential. Authors Anthony Bradley and Mark P. McDonald have studied successes and failures at more than 400 organizations to come up with proven techniques that best capitalize on collective behaviors of users. If effective collaboration is established with these users, the authors contend, corporate leaders can benefit from fresh insights about practices, products and emerging trends, among other key topic points. Bradley and McDonald are lead researchers at Gartner. Here are three social media success stories, plus seven best practices you can put to use today: