Table of Contents

Preface vii 1. The Arc of the Book 1 2. Social Failures and Social Solutions 9 3. "Meet" Solutions: eHarmony and OkCupid 25 4. "Meet" Solution: Twitter 49 5. "Friend" Solutions: Facebook and mixi 68 6. "Meet" and "Friend" Solutions: LinkedIn and Friendster 90 7. "Meet" and "Friend" Solution: MySpace 120 8. Social Strategies 137 9. Social Strategy at Zynga 151 10. Social Strategy at Yelp 170 11. Social Strategy at American Express 184 12. Social Strategy at Nike 205 13. Building Social Strategy at XCard and Harvard Business Review 220 14. Conclusions 249 Acknowledgments 257 Notes 259 References 263 Index 267

About the Author

Mikolaj Jan ("Misiek") Piskorski is associate professor of business administration and the Richard Hodgson Fellow in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School. His writing has appeared in the "Harvard Business Review", among other publications, and he has written the Harvard Business School Cases on many social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and MySpace.

Reviews

Winner of the 2015 Gold Medal in Networking, Axiom Business Book Awards "Piskorski's thought-provoking and well-researched title is ground-breaking and should be required reading for those in business, and business faculty and students."--Lucy Heckman, Library Journal (starred review) "For companies that are struggling to measure social media, Piskorski offers a different way of looking at the problem, and his three tests--the social utility test, the social solution test and the business value test--provide a way to check if a project is working."--Maija Palmer, Financial Times "Whoever thinks using social media successfully (i.e., making money from it) is easy needs to think again. So do people who think it's all one big fad or that creating a successful social media campaign is just blind luck. And that's where Mikolaj Jan Piskorski and his book A Social Strategy: How We Profit from Social Media come in."--Catherine Ramsdell, PopMatters "A highly informative and insightful analysis of web-based social platforms that should command the attention of sociologists, psychologists and lay readers as well as bottom-line businessmen and women."--Glenn C. Altschuler, Psychology Today "Thanks to Mikolaj Jan Piskorski and his new book, companies now have a clear strategic framework for figuring out how to tap into their power."--Theodore Kinney, Strategy + Business "The author's research offers new insights into the reasons for the explosion of social media."--Choice "The beauty of this book is that it is not only informative to scholars, but also applicable for business practitioners."--Yongsheng Wang, International Social Science Review "Social platforms are here to stay, and companies that successfully leverage these platforms as part of their social strategy are more likely to achieve competitive advantage. Empirical research is needed to establish specific mechanisms behind these processes and their outcomes. Piskorski's book provides a fruitful conceptual foundation for such research."--Olga Khessina, Administrative Science Quarterly