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!

If you want to promote your Twitter profile with something more than just a plain old text link, feel free to visit this page.  There are quite a few to choose from.

You can even design a graphic of your own, for the background.

Here is the link to the code:

http://twittercounter.com/?inc=buttons&username=YOUR-TWITTER-USERNAME

Hint: if you are lazy with HTML code or don’t know how to change it, simply append the end of the link with your username, like so

username=YOUR-TWITTER-USERNAME

Replace “YOUR-TWITTER-USERNAME” with your Twitter name, exactly as it appears on your profile.

I was reading a blog post the other day about Britney Spears’ Twitter account and thought to myself, “Oh, golly, another celebrity Twitter account!”

So many are filled with trite, silly tweets logged by their flunkies/managers/what-have-you’s, that it’s silly.

Being real on Twitter means being yourself

You’d think… here’s a person with such enormous celebrity and so many fans who listen to them, and they wind up being just another crappy PR Twitter account, blowing their changes to attempt to make a real connection with their fans, increase their credibility, etc. more…

So you have a web site.  Or a blog.  Or whatever it is you want to promote on the web.  Promoting online through social media and social networks can seem like waving a magic wand, and if you are putting out what people like to hear or read, it can seem like a simple way to do marketing when you find out folks to pay attention to you, vs. mailing out postcards, stomping the pavement and going door-to-door to introduce yourself to other businesses, etc.

The trick is, though, to get people to listen to you and trust you, eventually buying from you!  When networking online through social media or networking sites, a good rule to keep in mind more…

I get so many cool links to great links from my followers and folks whom I follow.  Here are the top items I found most useful or interesting so far, with a credit to the Twitter-er.

Enjoy! more…

I joined Twitter this summer, and have been actively using it for just over a month or so. In that time, I’ve made several observations of others and of my own habits with Twitter usage.

Here are some of my recommendations to being an effective and valuable Tweeter that folks will want to follow, take part in what you are putting out, such as clicking your links, etc., and ultimately one that people will trust and respect, leading to mutually beneficial relationships, and hopefully more business for you!
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