Do Leadership & Social Media Go Hand-in-Hand? Review of Charlene Li's Book "Open Leadership"

I recently reviewed Charlene Li's new book, Open Leadership, for my Ad Age column. Here's a link and an excerpt: 

"Li argues that social media-enabled services and sites can "improve efficiency, communication and decision-making for leaders and their organizations." The book is less a sequential follow-up to her impressive "Groundswell" collaboration with former Forrester colleague Josh Bernoff than a more forceful and practical reinforcement of many of the same themes, albeit with a special emphasis on mission-critical leadership skills. Key ingredients of "open leadership" success, Li suggests, include respecting employee and customer power, sharing constantly to build trust, nurturing curiosity and humility, holding openness accountable, and (are we ready for this everyone?) forgiving failure.

"Importantly, Li aggressively takes off the table all our lame excuses for not having a credible "ROI" strategy for social media. She does acknowledges upfront that the "difficulty with today's new social technologies -- like Facebook, blogs, discussion forums and Twitter -- is that they appear to lack clear, direct benefits compared to more established relationship channels," but she then proceeds to articulate such direct benefits. She offers, for instance, ROI templates like the "New Customer Lifetime Calculation," which smartly marries traditional lifetime value metrics with new value sources, from referrals and insights to ideation and user-contribution systems and support.