A first look at Friends With Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook
Just before Christmas, I was delighted to receive a copy of this book, produced by No Starch Press, as part of a drawing on Facebook run by Boxcar Marketing.
I’ve already delved into what looks like will be a fantastic resource for social media marketing, and although I typically read books the old-fashioned way, by starting with chapter one, this time I couldn’t resist flipping through and just stopping to read whatever caught my eye.
The table of contents is rich with promising tips and guides. For the beginner social media marketer, this book should prove to be fantastically helpful. And although I’m no newbie into the forays of social media, I know it will also be very beneficial for me, as I work to help my clients—mainly small businesses and organizations—begin & maintain social media campaigns and also continue marketing my web design business.
One thing I noticed right off the bat, was the way the authors intorduce the reader to social media and how it kind of all started. For someone who’s been online since 1998, I know that things have come a long way since the old chat rooms and usenet boards of the pre-dot.com boom. For those who haven’t been online as long as I have (dinosaur alert!), this will be a very interesting part to read.
As a fairly active participant in social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and a formerly more active MySpace user, I’ve seen and done a lot. I have used LinkedIn to help people find jobs and connect small business owners with prospective leads and other networkers. I had successfully created and managed a Facebook Group and Fan Page for a prominent member of an organization as part of a political campaign, and have used Twitter to meet some really fun people with common interests and tons of resources.
Sometimes I feel overwhelmed with all the social media I have my fingers dipped into over the past few years, and have the urge to want to “start over” with a fresh, clean slate—and by starting over, doing things the right way—or at least with some measurable goals in mind. This book will most likely help me to grasp some of the important fundamentals of what social media marketing is really about, what it’s supposed to do, what to expect, and how to measure results/data.
I am still reading this, and every time I finish a page or two, I’m inspired to want to “start over” in many ways.
When I finish this book, I will provide a complete review, and perhaps some of things I started doing as a result. I’m very excited to read it!
