Product Description

The Ultimate Guide To Social Media Marketing

The Social Media Bible will show you how to build or transform your business into a social media—enabled enterprise where customers, employees, and prospects connect, collaborate, and champion your products, your services, and your way of doing business.

Using the systematic approach presented in this comprehensive guide, you'll learn how to:

• Increase your company and brand value by engaging people in new forms of communication, collaboration, education, and entertainment
• Determine which social media tactics you should be using with your customers and employees
• Evaluate and categorize the tools and applications that constitute the rapidly evolving social media ecosystem
• Make social media tools like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, blogging, podcasting, and hundreds of others a part of your business strategy
• Do a social media analysis inside your company to improve internal operations and outside your company to create and monetize relationships with customers and prospects
• Implement social media micro- and macrostrategies to give your business the competitive edge it needs to survive and thrive

Virtually every business can use social media to increase sales and profits, and The Social Media Bible will show you how. Part One introduces you to social media, and gives you a helpful framework, and presents practical and tactical tips for using some of these tools. Part Two introduces you to over 100 social media tools and applications in fifteen different categories, giving you a quick rundown of the features and functions of the tools that should become part of your social media strategy. Part Three offers mini exercises and assessments to help you conduct a social media audit of your company, your competition, and your customers, so you can craft the perfect strategy for your business.

If you want to grow your business, you have to stay connected to your stakeholders- whether you're a big corporation, a small business, or even a nonprofit. The Social Media Bible will show you how to harness the collective wisdom and viral value of your stakeholders and stay ahead of your competition.
www.TheSocialMediaBible.com

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2088 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 840 pages

About the Author
Lon Safko is an innovator and professional speaker with more than twenty years of experience in entrepreneurship, marketing, sales, strategic partnering, speaking, training, writing, and e-commerce. He is the founder of eight successful companies, including Paper Models, Inc., and www.LonSafko.com.

David K. Brake is the CEO and founder of Content Connections, a company that uses social media strategies to help clients build economically viable relationships around their content. Visit him at www.DKBrake.com and www.contentconnections.com.

Customer Reviews

This book is an 800-pound guerilla when it comes to social media marketing. Four thumbs up!

Great book! Loved it! It's huge and heavy and not particularly pricey. I found it to be well organized and well written. And it was certainly packed to the gills with content. There are 43 chapters split into three different sections: (1) Background basics & tactics, (2) Tools, & (3) Strategy. The chapters in the first part provide an introduction and framework regarding the book. The numerous chapters in the second part cover 100+ social media tools. And the last five or six chapters in the third part can help you do an audit of the social media marketing your company does (or doesn't do).

The book is comprehensive. I haven't seen a book that covers so much and in such depth on the topic of social media marketing (or Internet Marketing). There were a ton of "Expert Insights" sprinkled throughout the text that really made the book shine. And each chapter ended with three summaries: (1) Commandments, (2) Conclusion, & (3) Readings & Resources. Each were well done. In particular the Readings & Resources for each chapter were better than most books have at the end of an entire book. 6 stars!

PS. To see the chapter titles and how the book is specifically organized I encourage you to peek at the Search Inside feature Amazon offers for this book. With 43 chapters there are a lot of chapter titles to read.

A Comprehensive Social Media Resource
Ask a hundred people what "social media" is, and you may get a hundred different definitions. Frankly, social media doesn't just connect people--it baffles them, too. The authors of "The Social Media Bible," however, have made a considerable attempt at creating a resource that helps readers gain an overall understanding of the social media "ecosystem" (to put it in the authors' terms) and how the social media phenomenon relates to business.

First, I think it's in order to discuss what this tome covers. Part I, Background Basics and Tactics, comprises the first 23 chapters. This section of the book defines social media, explains the different types of social media, and helps you understand why it's important. You get coverage here of everything from social networks to microblogging to virtual worlds. If you've read other books about social media, you may already be familiar with some of this content. If you're brand new to social media, you'll find it especially helpful.

Part II, Tools, comprises chapters 24-38 and revisits the different categories of social media, focusing on current popular tools. The authors discuss each tool, focusing on who should use them and why; you'll even find some more technical information in these chapters. Although I appreciated the broad look at all the different types of the social media, I felt that the sections could have gone into more detail. However, you could easily write an entire book on each type of social media presented, so the authors clearly had to limit coverage of each type of social media resource.

Part III, Strategy, includes the final chapters of 39-43 and offers some excellent advice on how to apply everything learned in the book. I appreciated the bits of advice spread throughout as well as the cohesive strategies presented. I especially found the chapter "The Four Pillars of Social Media Strategy" helpful, which discusses how a social media strategy should have goals of communication, collaboration, education, and entertainment.

Although some of the principles in this book will endure, much of the descriptions for current social media tools will quickly go out of date (as some already have). However, the authors clearly recognized this and intended it to be a timely book. If you're new to the concept of social media and seeking how to apply social media to your business, the "Social Media Bible" is a great resource. If you're already familiar with using social media, you may find yourself skipping some of the basic information in the book. Overall, I believe there is wisdom for everyone to find in this useful guide--the kind of wisdom that will help you to give new life to your company's online marketing efforts in the social media world.

Good book, but not a bible
This book is a good way to get familiar with online social tools. The author covers ways to use email, social networking tools and publishing tools. He has good information about establishing some goals and determining a strategy for meeting the goals. He also has a lot of useful references if you want to get more familiar with a particular topic.

I only gave it three stars for the following reasons:
- Too much coverage of the history of the internet, email, and web pages. If I was interested in that, I'd get a book on the history of the internet, email, and web pages.
- Misinformation on some tools, and missing information about other tools. For instance, the author mentions Joomla, a content management system that can be used to create websites and blogs. He mentions it in a way that may mislead people as to its uses when he states that it can pair with any number of applications. It might work with other applications, but that may require coding skills or money to pay someone to make them work together. He also ignores the multitude of other open source content management systems that are out there.
- A serious amount of repetition in sections one and two. A lot of what is stated in the second section is already in the first, so it added a few hundred pages without saying a whole lot.

This is a good book. It's less complete than the title suggests.