Making Market

Now, don’t take this personally–all you marketeers out there. But to preface this humble review, I’m reminded of a remark a friend made who never finished college, started out as a salesclerk, became VP of one of the biggest retail companies in the U.S., and retired at 40. She once said to me, “There are no geniuses in retail.” OK. I’m just the messenger. Don’t get mad. But given that statement, this book makes entire sense. Just how ‘good’ could a book be about how to position, promote, and ‘brand’ yourself using social media? It’s really common sense, isn’t it? I’m sure any ‘consumer’ could provide a ten-point ‘to do’ or ‘what not to do’ list in maintaining ‘relationships’ with current, past, or perspective customers. For example, if you’re a tech support person, don’t sigh and act like the person calling is an idiot (happened to me–until I spouted a bunch of html jargon to put the bored guy back to reality); don’t say your name is Todd or Jennifer (when you have an obvious Indian/Pakastani accent in your English–when people in that category tell me that, I ask them to spell their name-they can’t); if you’re using social media to announce a new product, event, suggestion, free offer, discount, etc., don’t sound overly enthusiastic–people nowadays won’t buy it. Sound HONEST and SINCERE via social media even if you’re not. Consider the brilliant words of George Burns, who stated, “Acting is all about truth, and if you can fake that, you have it made.” Well, now to the book. Still there? OK. Each chapter of this tome is devoted to a particular ‘genre’ of social media, i.e., e-mail, twitter, blogging, etc., OR a ‘platform’ within a particular genre, i.e., sections are devoted to LinkedIn, Facebook, LiveJournal, MySpace: all the usual suspects (including a few not so usual ones). Just a couple of problems here. First, do we really need extensive info about e-mail at this point as a form of ‘keeping in touch’ let alone a definition of e-mail?? I don’t think so. Then regarding the structure of this ‘bible.’ After each chapter, there is sort of summary in the guise of “commandments”: thou shall do this; thou shall not do this, etc. Now, come on guys. We know you don’t mean this stuff is ‘religious’ or ’spiritual’ in the traditional sense, but unfortunately, our society is getting closer and closer to day when marketing WILL BE a religion, at which point we are all in deep S–T. Why encourage it? If you can’t figure out WHY this is dangerous, I’m not about to give a lecture here. OK, then as for the ‘commandments.’ This goes back to my original statement. There really isn’t much more than common sense. Ever get a job and have to sit through a corporate video/dvd of the company’s policies? You know the kind. You sit in an antiseptic room, and after five minutes start staring at the scratch on the door and wonder how it got there because the presentation is so mind-numbing? That’s about how revelatory the ‘commandments’ are here. Now for the good part. Well, if you’re scrolling around a social media site, trying to locate the help link and are ready to go ballistic with your monitor, at least this book does give you a basic summary of the features of the most popular social media formats, and basics in how to navigate them, so perhaps it will cut down on those WTF!@! moments. But other than that, there’s not much else to commend this book. It doesn’t provide the ‘meat’ of marketing, i.e., how to use marketing analysis, psychographics, experiments, etc., which, if you consider marketing to be a form of applied psychology or sociology, are essential to your success. But hats off to the authors for coming up with a bible/commandment structure. That will help sell the book. Which reminds me of another anecdote. I have another friend who plans to write a steamy sex/erotic book about the goings on in a health spa. I asked him how did he know the book would sell. He responded, “Are you kidding? The title of the book is going to be _SPA_. The title alone will sell 50,000 copies.” Go for it!
Rating: 3 / 5

After considerable research and reading over a dozen books on Social Media this year, SMB is far and away the best. And best by at least an order of magnitude.

Read the Social Media Bible FIRST before you read any other book on Social Media.(I rank “Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Shirky as a strong second; however, it’s written for a slightly different purpose.)

My company is in process of creating an online Library Of Mind Mapping using the ideas, suggestions, and solid usable knowledge so well recorded in SMB. Also, we’ll be using the social media platform [...], the “usability” wisdom of Dr. Jakob Nielsen ([...]), and the pricing concepts of Chris Anderson (his book “FREE!”) to bring a new way of visual thinking across all landscapes.

How fantastic and wonderful it is to be able to access these great warehouses of knowledge, wisdom, and ideas for so little cost.

Glenn L. Flock

President, G2F, Inc

Rating: 5 / 5

This is an incredibly invaluable tool! We started a blog for our non-profit last year, which increased our traffic at the time, and did some SEO based on info we found on the internet, but The Social Media Bible really helped us hone in on our plan for the use of all our internet-based resources so that they aren’t just a bunch of individual, random efforts but are part of a well-orchestrated execution to get our charitable message out in front of the right people and help parents of children with special needs to access the services that everyone’s tax dollars have already been committed to providing but which were being (often unlawfully) denied. See [...]
Rating: 4 / 5