Ideas for leaders to engage directly with customers to shape their brand and marketplace success Since its debut E-commerce has been centered on the transaction, which represents less than one percent of the time we spend online. Now, we are entering the era of Pre-Commerce where customers make their own decision to buy or support a brand before the transaction. Pre-Commerce explains how the exploding use of social media channels has fundamentally changed the way customers go about making their purchasing decisions, how they educate themselves and why they choose to support certain brands above others. It shows what executives must do to re-create the way their companies interact with and learn from their customers, employees and competitors. It includes exclusive interviews and anecdotes Pearson has conducted or experienced with numerous influential C-suite executives during his time as leader of Dell’s global social media team and as a consultant to Fortune 1000 companies, worldwide. Offers a step-by-step process for leaders to apply this knowledge to begin transforming their companies, right now Begins with a foreword from Mark Addicks, Chief Marketing Officer, General Mills Over 25 Fortune 500 executives interviewed, including special side-bar interviews with Michael Dell and Marc Benioff Explores the concept of "Pre-commerce"--the customer's decision making happens well before a transaction takes place and continues after the transaction, representing 99% of time spent online, often outside a company’s reach today Shows how to build internal employee networks and how to take your first and most important steps to integrate social media throughout your company. Pearson reveals that the best ideas are often free and the technology needed is rarely a cost-issue. Instead, it's a matter of the top executive deciding to adopt a new way of engaging directly with its customers.

In Stateless Commerce, Barak Richman uses the colorful case study of the diamond industry to explore how ethnic trading networks operate and why they persist in the twenty-first century. How, for example, does the 47th Street diamond district in midtown Manhattan—surrounded by skyscrapers and sophisticated financial institutions—continue to thrive as an ethnic marketplace that operates like a traditional bazaar? Conventional models of economic and technological progress suggest that such primitive commercial networks would be displaced by new trading paradigms, yet in the heart of New York City the old world persists. Richman’s explanation is deceptively simple. Far from being an anachronism, 47th Street’s ethnic enclave is an adaptive response to the unique pressures of the diamond industry. Ethnic trading networks survive because they better fulfill many functions usually performed by state institutions. While the modern world rests heavily on lawyers, courts, and state coercion, ethnic merchants regularly sell goods and services by relying solely on familiarity, trust, and community enforcement—what economists call “relational exchange.” These commercial networks insulate themselves from the outside world because the outside world cannot provide those assurances. Extending the framework of transactional cost and organizational economics, Stateless Commerce draws on rare insider interviews to explain why personal exchange succeeds, even as most global trade succumbs to the forces of modernization, and what it reveals about the limitations of the modern state in governing the economy.

Well before states, literacy, or legal systems, there were commerce and trade, which are found in all societies irrespective of politics, social norms or ideologies. Athenian landowners, Roman senators and Qing mandarins screened their participation in commerce and trade. Legal and informal institutions were developed to secure persons and property, resolve commercial disputes, raise capital and share risk, promote fair dealing, regulate agents and gather market information. Law and Commerce in Pre-Industrial Societies examines commerce, its participants and these institutions through the lens of nine pre-industrial societies: Hunter/gatherers, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Athens, Rome, the early Islamic world, medieval Europe, medieval Southern India and Qing China. The book provides historical perspective to contemporary debates about the relationship between commerce and law, public ordering versus privately created systems of law, the rule of law and the relative merits of courts versus merchant networks to resolve disputes.

Ideas for leaders to engage directly with customers to shape their brand and marketplace success Since its debut E-commerce has been centered on the transaction, which represents less than one percent of the time we spend online. Now, we are entering the era of Pre-Commerce where customers make their own decision to buy or support a brand before the transaction. Pre-Commerce explains how the exploding use of social media channels has fundamentally changed the way customers go about making their purchasing decisions, how they educate themselves and why they choose to support certain brands above others. It shows what executives must do to re-create the way their companies interact with and learn from their customers, employees and competitors. It includes exclusive interviews and anecdotes Pearson has conducted or experienced with numerous influential C-suite executives during his time as leader of Dell’s global social media team and as a consultant to Fortune 1000 companies, worldwide. Offers a step-by-step process for leaders to apply this knowledge to begin transforming their companies, right now Begins with a foreword from Mark Addicks, Chief Marketing Officer, General Mills Over 25 Fortune 500 executives interviewed, including special side-bar interviews with Michael Dell and Marc Benioff Explores the concept of "Pre-commerce"--the customer's decision making happens well before a transaction takes place and continues after the transaction, representing 99% of time spent online, often outside a company’s reach today Shows how to build internal employee networks and how to take your first and most important steps to integrate social media throughout your company. Pearson reveals that the best ideas are often free and the technology needed is rarely a cost-issue. Instead, it's a matter of the top executive deciding to adopt a new way of engaging directly with its customers.