John Jantsch, Author of The Referral Engine, Gets Your Business Buzzing (at Zero Cost)

John Jantsch has 40,000 followers on Twitter. But that makes sense considering he is the author of The Referral Engine, Teaching Your Business to Market Itself. While the book teaches readers how to become better marketers, The Referral Engine Janstch draws the correlation between culture and "referability." The ability of a company to market itself. This has also been called Net Promoter Score or "would you recommend this product or service to a friend"?

For companies with amazing culture, driven and encouraged from leadership, everyone is in marketing. A major piece of this is investment in culture, training and development. While most companies cut investments in team building, development and training, the ROI on an investment in culture might surprise you. The focus on social business strategies is driven from the top, but too many companies are still ignoring the inevitable.

Great leaders understand that their organization needs to begin experimenting with internal and external social strategies. Some companies Janstch cites are achieving big wins with what is called a social media "sandbox." The sandbox is a safety zone for experimentation.

Jantsch provides a call to action for companies or leaders who are not embracing social technologies. How are you going to use the technology in a way that benefits the brand, the culture and the customer? Great companies create a sandbox allowing employees and departments to experiment within set parameters—this does not include an extensive vetting process by legal.

Jantsch wants his readers to know social media provides a set of tools to have more control because we can hear what is being said but steer or correct conversations. When people change their mindset the fear dissipates. When PR controls the spin and legal says this is what we can and can’t say, we have lost control. It is still early in the era of referral engines but it’s important for organizations to start experimenting in the sandbox. And in this podcast Jantsch reminds us to not be afraid of losing control due to social because "we never really had control."