“The Dragonfly Effect” by Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith with Carlye Adler is a book on “quick, effective, and powerful ways to use social media to drive social change”. It fuses ‘social’ back into social media, and empowers those who desire to make a substantial impact for the benefit of social and meaningful change. As the book states, small actions create big change. You just need a goal, passion and heart, and a willingness to put one foot in front of the other. It is in “The Dragonfly Effect” where we learn that when our four wings (key actions) are moving in concert, we can move in any direction and produce colossal results despite our income or social status. As a blogger, a communicator, and a dreamer, I find this incredibly inspiring both for myself and for my client, AWC Metro Phoenix Chapter. I hope you will, too.

                                           •••••••••••••••••••••••••••

However, it is the second wing, Grab Attention, which must be done correctly to be effective and have lasting results. It has to have the ‘stickiness’ factor. The chapter must work to break through the noise that threatens to steal their members’ attention. This includes family, social media, traditional media, the Internet, and pressures of everyday life. People have built up immunity to marketing and rightfully so. As the book points out, and I fully agree with, there is too much information in our everyday lives to process.

In order to speak to your audience, you must “understand their plight and create a message that speaks to them”. How? Get personal. This could include finding unique ways to incorporate tagging photos with #awcphoenix that can spread through various social media platforms such as Facebook, a powerful platform for building and maintaining relationships with target audiences. Other effective strategies are to elicit emotion in messages in order to create connections, use attention grabbing facts in statements, begin presentations with open-ended and intriguing messages, and employ perfectly placed humor in order to keep a light and approachable tone.


The third wing, Engage, is to compel your audience to care deeply about your cause/organization.  As the book states, “engagement has little to do with logic or reason”. If you engage your audience emotionally, you will gain their interest and attention. Get to know them.  Who are they, what are they going through, and what do they need? Build online communities through your organization, and be a wealth of knowledge for your chapter to turn to with questions.  Through social media you can let your members and potential members know you are there, and that you are there for them. If the Metro Phoenix Chapter is transparent, committed to the success of the organization and the women involved, trust will build between the founding member and members. For any organization, trust is essential for growth.

The fourth, and last, wing, Take Action, is meant to empower and enable the members of the organization by providing the tools to get them to do something. The call to action is a great place to start. “When organizations combine the power of the call to action with innovative social media tools, they can achieve extraordinary results.” Whatever you ask your members to do, it is imperative that what you ask of them is “highly focused, absolutely specific, and oriented to actions, so as to avoid overwhelming your audience”. Take small, easy, and fun steps, as “small asks lead to better results”, and make sure your members don’t have to ask to take action. When members have to ask, it is to to reevaluate. 

Yes, the book says it can work, and I agree. Especially if the organization has focused on a single goal, found a way to grab the attention of their audience, how to engage with them, and identified strategies that enable and empower them to take action. With realistic expectations, the organizations goals can be accomplished and highly successful. As The Dragonfly Effect points out, in a world where a wedding video can reach millions of views, we have an enormous opportunity to make a great impact. It is my belief that the AWC Metro Phoenix Chapter can make it a good one.

(See disclaimer under 'Author')

In this day and age, if an organization wants to be successful, it needs to think and act like a media company, or so the majority says.

We live in a social media driven world. If a brand is to embrace this world, it must learn how to navigate within this world effectively. The brand will need to fight through and stand out amidst the social media frenzy that threatens to consume its potential consumers on a daily, minute-by-minute basis.

Brands embracing the social media driven world will find that consumers are tricky to navigate. They have their own social media habits (checking and liking posts on Facebook, and checking Twitter, and LinkedIn, to name a few), and their habits are difficult to track due to the fact that we live in a “multi-screen economy” (Brito, “Your Brand: The Next Media Company”, 2013). While consumers may start a task on their smart phones, such as shopping, the task is usually continued and finished across a number of devices, such as a tablet and/or PC/Laptop. Not easy to follow. So how will your organization get the attention of a potential member, sponsor and/or advertiser (for the sake of brevity, we will group them together as ‘consumers’)? By creating relevant content.

Relevance is figuring out what interests your consumer, and how you can become apart of their conversation(s). You will need to get to know your consumer very well. Thankfully, there are many tools out there that will help you do just that. (Check out Demographics Pro, and Wisdom App. For more info on DP, click here, or if you want to find out if your friends are republicans or democrats, just click here.)                                                                        

You may be saying to yourself, “Hey! Let’s start a bunch of social media accounts! We can get our brand out there for next to nothing!” Hold it, Cowboy. Not so fast. The ride is not for the faint of heart, and you will spare that heart of yours if you plan. And by plan I mean PLAN.

There are a number of things to consider and prepare for before diving in. Social media by-and-large is viewed as fun and exciting, and at times a platform for a public meltdown (Which is still exciting. Who doesn’t like to watch a train-wreck?!). Everyone has an opinion, and there are many voices that want to be heard. Let’s highlight a few of the challenges you are likely to face.

1.         Content: You must generate a lot of relevant, rich content. You will lose credibility fast if you start a social media page and then fail to post consistently. British Airlines got the social media backhand for “being on Twitter for a few months and only updating their account seven or so times” (Brito, 2013). According to a quote by Adi Betton–CEO of ownerlistens.com in this article written by Jennifer Lonoff Shiff,  “consumers expect you to be monitoring them”. If you aren’t posting or responding, then you are ignoring.

2.         Employees Inappropriate Use of Social Media: It’s bound to happen. For excellent examples, click here. Having a strategy to avoid such disasters in place is imperative.

3.         What are my roles? What are my responsibilities? Social media jobs need a home in a company. Do they belong in marketing or PR? Don’t know? Most people don’t. Create a solid strategy so that the roles and responsibilities are clear as day to your entire staff, (especially to the rowdy bottom-line marketing teams :) ). (Brito, 2013)

To help generate content, use your employees, customers, and partners. Storytelling is a highly effective approach as it forms connections. Connections produce brand advocacy (bonus!), which feeds right back into the stakeholders (double bonus!).

Consider both long-form and short-form storytelling. Everything is short and sweet these days, which isn’t necessarily a problem unless all of your stories are short, and you realize you have a great story that is far longer than 140 characters. To attract readers to your stories, consider your title carefully, as that is the first thing a reader will see. Interestingly enough, titles containing negative extremes (“worst” or “never”), and/or the words “surprise” and “dollar sign” do better than titles without these words (Brito, 2013). Titles can make or break you.

These techniques will help in building relationships with your customer (brand loyalty!), but remember, relationships change so be flexible. Here is what Peter Friedman, CEO of LiveWorld, had to say in a recent guest post on Scott Monty’s website: “As you develop followers, their activity will help you revise and improve your approach, leading to new answers and ideas...With customers’ help your brand will evolve and grow stronger and with it their loyalty.”

With so much emphasis on using social media for marketing, and even with impressive statistics, is becoming a “social media company” the only way to grow? Perhaps not. Consider these successful businesses that are doing just fine without the likes of Facebook and Twitter (thankyouverymuch). And then there are the smaller businesses that aren’t having much success promoting their brand on social media despite their best efforts, according to a recent article written by Oliver St. John. The reasons vary, including efforts placed on social media over websites, which are already proven to work.


The bottom line is the consumer. Know your consumer well. Study demographics and psychographics, and find out how your consumer views social media. With this information, the right strategies, and the right tools, you can make an informed decision on the best approach to becoming a ‘social media company’, and if it’s right for your company at all.