The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways To Use Social Media to Drive Social Change

The Dragonfly Effect is recommended as one of the better books that discusses how social media works and to get advice on how to think about your own initiative. The authors focus the book on the application of social media to social causes, but do not let this focus deter you from thinking that the book is only applicable to not-for-profit situations.The book is organized around the four things the authors have learned in developing course materials at Stanford's business school. The four things are:FocusGrab AttentionEngageTake ActionThe authors employ these areas and their own advice in this book by concentrating on a focused subject - the use of social media to do good. They start with attention grabbing stories of individuals and how they and groups formed using social media to do good. The material is engaging from the perspective that the reader can see how they can apply these ideas or would want to participate in such a cause. Finally, he decision trees and other support leads one to take action.This places the book somewhere between the thinking and content found in a Seth Godin or Clay Shirky book and the plethora of recipe oriented books about social media. The advice in this book is similar to what you will find in just about every book on social media. That may lead you to discount this advice, but I believe that Aker and Smith found it first and have described it better.The book is recommended for people who want to understand the principles, practices and ideas that drive social media as its more at the general public than others. Marketing and Communications will find more advice than managers who are looking for ways to think through these issues with an eye toward implementation.Overall this is one of the better books to discuss social media, it is about a 4.5 stars -- too descriptive to provide a 5 star review, but prescriptive and clear enough to warrant a more than a three star rating, which is how I came to give it four stars.The Dragonfly effect is a good book; you will not waste your time reading it. Highly recommended as the first book on social media, you should read, but if you have read others chances are, you will hear a similar refrain in this work. Still worth the read.StrengthsAction oriented in describing both what works, why it works and how it might work for you. Each chapter ends with a decision tree that reflects its contents and offers a way to put the ideas into practice.The stories are personal and compelling describing how people used social media to support creating positive results in the world. This is an attitude that reflects both the social dimension of social media as well as its application as a business tool.The book is comprehensive without being onerous. It is written in a style that makes for clear reading and the ideas very accessible. Its focus is descriptive and its audience appears to be aimed more toward marketing executives than general or line managers.ChallengesThe book could benefit from more discussion of the application of the technology and the techniques that drive the four forces they describe. Instead, the book describes the situation and the results with limited discussion of how they got those results.The book tries a little too hard to 'brand' around the idea of the dragonfly. The point the authors make the dragonfly a focus because it has the ability to move in every direction equally well. That is true and its true of good social media, but the advice provided in the book appears more as a sequential process than a set of interdependent abilities.The stories in the book, while engaging and illustrative, basically follows the same pattern of the four actions of the 'dragonfly.' This makes the books messages tight, but it keeps the book from exploring the richness of the innovations and different ways people are using social media to create good.The book's examples place have an over reliance on Facebook and Twitter as the basis for social media success. While these platforms are important and give the individuals discussed in the book a basis to build a community, they are not the only means to engage in social media.

Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith are clear that their goal in writing The Dragonfly Effect was to help the reader harness social technology to meet their goals. While the use of animal-themed literary devices to make business points could be worn out after penguins, mice, beavers and hedgehogs; that is not the case with this well-written and useful social media guide.The Dragonfly in this case has a body (to keep it and your social media goals airborne) and four wings: wing 1 is focus, wing 2 is grab attention, wing 3 is engage and wing 4 is take action. Each wing (idea) gets its own chapter and includes very useful Design Principles that offer actionable material throughout the book.What I especially liked about the book was the relevant case studies, a clear, engaging writing style and the sense that both authors are passionate about not only social media and its ability to effect change, but more importantly teaching the reader how to "know what they know" to orchestrate their own social media success story.If you are looking to harness social media to accomplish a specific goal this is a great place to start.

You can read this slim, 171-page book in a few hours. In that short time, however, you'll come across so many great examples that you'll be overwhelmed with ideas for your own change initiatives. Instead of the well-worn stories from Best Buy and Dell and Wikipedia (sigh!), you'll read about Sameer and Vinay and about Alex's Lemonade foundation. It's an engaging, well-written book, reminding me of "Made to Stick" and "Switch" (other 5-star books whose co-author wrote the foreward).The subtitle refers to driving "social change" but it's not limited to that. If you have a goal and want to build a tribe to achieve that goal, then buy this book.p.s. A short story that shows the authors practice what they preach. After talking about the book at work, several colleagues mentioned it on Twitter, resulting in the following exchange:@adam_mayer:: "Just ordered "The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways To Use Social Media to Drive Social Change" by @aaker on Amazon."(10 minutes later) @tolsen: "Lucky you in the US: 2-4 weeks delivery time at Amazon.de RT @adam_mayer: Just ordered "The Dragonfly Effect" by @aaker on Amazon.".Then he started to follow @aaker(5 minutes later) Direct Message from @aaker: "Email your address & I'll send you a signed copy. Give the other that you ordered to a friend."Awesome! Since then, everyone on our team is reading the book to help us with a dozen or so change initiatives.

This book provides a great road map for harnessing social media for infectious action. Reading it will be of enormous value to both individuals and organizations wanting to mobilize support for a cause or brand.As someone who does research on cause-related marketing, I also consider this book to be very relevant for understanding how firms can most effectively communicate their CSR actions in a way that has maximal impact.However, this book is not just for nonprofits and companies involved in cause related marketing. Indeed, although many of the examples are about efforts to help others, the book also offers concrete ideas that can be used by brands to build meaningful relationships with customers as well as employees. The broader scope of this book is on using social media to inspire people to take actions that will truly make a difference. Illustrations of how this can work for brands include examples from large companies such as Nike, eBay, and Google as well as from smaller ventures such as FourSquare, Groupon and Cookpad.In a world where so many organizations are struggling to develop a meaningful social media strategy, this book does a great job of offering hands-on tools, based on solid academic research, for how to do it right. Its definitely a must-read!

Bought on reading a review in Success magazine combining this and Crush It will give a very good start to using social media the only negative is the focus on non profits rather than profit businesses

I actually deleted my Facebook so I can realign my approach on social media, thanks to the book

This book is poor value for money. Would not recommend purchase.There is no meaningfully instruction just a series of case notes