Book Review: The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Social Change

The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways To Use Social Media to Drive Social Change by Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith has been sitting on my reading shelf for over nine years. I don’t have a good reason why I did not read it before now. But I am glad that I did. I would also have to say that the lessons in the book are as relevant now as when the book first came out. The purpose of the book is to explain how one can use social media for social good. While business owners can benefit from this book, I believe those in the non-profit sector will gain the most value.

The Dragonfly Effect is 211 pages long. Aaker and Smith arranged the book into six major parts and an introduction. The major chapters include:

• The Dragonfly Body: The System That Keeps It Airborne
• Wing 1: Focus: How to Hatch a Goal That Will Make an Impact
• Wing 2: Grab Attention: How to Stick Out in an Overcrowded, Overmessaged, Noisy World
• Wing 3: Engage: How to Make People Connect with Your Goal
• Wing 4: Take Action: How to Empower Others, Enable Them—and Cultivate a Movement
• Onward and Upward: You’re Flying! Now What?

The Dragonfly Effect takes on an academic feel to the writing. This is in great part due to the backgrounds of the writers. Aaker is a professor at Stanford and Smith advises companies on marketing, customer strategy, and operations.

Throughout the book, the authors shared examples that illustrated the points they were trying to make. They also included callouts that focused on specific lessons. Each of the different parts of the Dragonfly Effect strategy was well researched.

Aaker and Smith also used mnemonics to help readers keep a group of concepts in mind. For example, the five design principles to focus were simplified to the word HATCH. Hatch stood for Humanistic, Actionable, Testable, Clarity, and Happiness.

The book also included checklists and actionable flowcharts to help put the lessons into action. Many of these lessons came from different successful campaigns.

The Dragonfly Effect is packed full of case studies. Each of these case studies drives home an important lesson.

Toward the end of the book, the authors pulled everything together in a one-page matrix. This matrix will serve as easy to use tool to help implement the model.

While there is a link to a supporting website, it appears that the website has been abandoned. There are now many broken links. Pity.

There is a lot of great information in The Dragonfly Effect. I believe it can help many non-profit organizations hone their message and would recommend it. It is a shame that I waited so long to read this book.

Additional Reading

• Book Review: Organizations Don’t Tweet, People Do: A Manager’s Guide to the Social Web
• Book Review: A World Gone Social

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