Opting In (PDF)

Winning social business techniques for product managers, marketers, and business leaders!

• How product managers at IBM are using social business to transform markets and build vibrant global communities

• New best practices for promoting engagement, transparency, and agility

• A deeply personal case study: handbook, roadmap, autobiography, and inspiration

Does "social business" work? IBM has proven unequivocally: it does. In Opting In, IBM executive Ed Brill candidly shares best practices, challenges, and results from his social business journey, and shows how his team used it to transform existing products into thriving business lines.

This deeply personal extended case study offers you a detailed roadmap for achieving and profiting from deep customer engagement. Brill shares his 15+ years of product management experience at IBM and describes how these techniques and experiences have developed a vibrant marketplace of social business customers worldwide.

You'll learn how to use social business tools to strengthen customer intimacy, extend global reach, accelerate product lifecycles, and improve organizational effectiveness. You'll also discover how social business can help you enhance your personal brand-so you can build your career as you improve your business performance.

With a Foreword by Marcia Conner, Author and Principal Analyst at SensifyWork.

Using today's social business tools and approaches, product and brand managers can bring new products and services to market faster, identify new opportunities for innovation, and anticipate changing market conditions before competitors do. In Opting In, IBM's Ed Brill demonstrates how product managers can fully embrace social business and leverage the powerful opportunities it offers.

Brill explains why social business is not a fad, not "just people wasting time on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube," and not just for marketers. He shows how to drive real value from crowdsourcing, interactivity, and immediacy, and from relational links across your organization's full set of content and networks.

Drawing on his extensive experience at IBM, Brill explores powerful new ways to apply social business throughout product, service, and brand management. Using actual IBM examples, he offers candid advice for optimizing products by infusing them with the three core characteristics of social business: engagement, transparency, and agility.

Drive breakthrough product, service, and brand performance through:

Engagement: Optimize productivity and efficiency by deeply connecting customers, employees, suppliers, partners, influencers…maybe even competitors

Transparency: Demolish boundaries to information, experts, and assets-thereby improving alignment, knowledge, and confidence

Agility: Use information and insight to anticipate/address evolving opportunities, make faster decisions, and become more responsive