The Social Organization: How to Use Social Media to Tap the Collective Genius of Your Customers and Employees: Harvard Business Publishing

The answer is social technology. In this book, two of Gartner's lead analysts share their experience working with more than 300 companies who have successfully used social technologies to collect, and capitalize on, the wisdom of their employees.

This book focuses on the business and management use of social media, not on the technologies themselves. It teaches leaders how to produce predictable business results using collaboration tools, and how to focus on desired results while freeing employees to create their own roadmaps.

Where other books have described social technology trends, and how companies are beginning to use Facebook, wikis and collaborative software to connect employees to each other, this book takes the crucial next step and provides a prescriptive framework of 6 core principles that will help business leaders facilitate and capitalize on the new environment and its resources. Those principles are:

1. Participation: social media tools only work if everyone participates
2. Collective Purpose: everyone must understand the goal of participating to ensure useable outcomes
3. Transparency: Everyone must be privy to eath other's contributions so that content can be improved, corrected and allowed to evolve
4. Independence: Every participant must be able to contribute anytime, without having to request admittance
5. Capture and Contribute: contributions must be recorded and remain available for others to view, share and argue over
6. Emergence: you can't predict what will happen in this collaborative state. You must be willing to allow for unexpected outcomes like unknown expertise, new work processes, etc