Advertising 2.0 by Tracy L. Tuten book review

The book Advertising 2.0, social media marketing in a Web 2.0 world by Tracy L. Tuten is a very complete and descriptive book about advertising and social media. Tuten goes from describing how advertisers first advertised (through mass media) and then goes on to discuss why and how advertisers have decided to use the internet and various social media platforms as useful ways to advertise.

            She uses specific examples of events in order to highlight the history of advertising and the Internet in order to create a well-rounded description of advertising and social media. As well as using references to specific events in the history of technology and advertising she also uses statistics to further validate her explanations. The use of statistics and examples I feel is extremely useful for someone who is interested in gaining a complete knowledge of advertising through the Internet.

            The book is extremely easy to understand and uses a variety of real world examples in order to allow the reader to understand the book even more. The author goes into great detail about the vocabulary and history of advertising and social media in order to make sure the reader has a complete background of the information before delving into deeper more complicated topics. She even describes at great length a variety of social media sites. As well as that she also includes charts, and diagrams in order to further the books easy to understand context. One specific aspect that I thought was very useful was the fact that Tuten made sure to not only just define the vocabulary of the topic at hand but also explain how and why certain tools were useful and also talk about negative aspects of them while using real life examples and statistics to back the information up.

            There were a few things that I did not find favorable about the book. In many sections of the book I felt like the author was talking to a very non –technological generation. For those who do not know anything about social media I recommend this book highly because I think it does a great job of going to great lengths to make sure the reader understands the material. However for people like me and for people who are already quite involved in social media I think that it might be better to choose a book that skips the general history and explanation of social media aspects and focuses on the aspects and social media sites that not that many people know of yet.

Another problem is that this book is a from 2008, which means it is not up to date and in an ever changing world like social media it is a good idea to read a book that is up to date. I would say that in 2008 this book would’ve been extremely useful even for those who already know a lot about social media. I say this because it gives a lot of advice of how to advertise through social media. However, now over three years later most companies already know all this and are on to new things in order to keep a leg up on other companies.

Overall, I’d like to recommend this book to those who would like a comprehensive and understandable book about how to advertise through social media.

Jessica W. 

Justin Tuma's Review for “Likeable Social Media”:


 

Dave Kerpen’s book acts as practical guide to utilizing social media - not just in marketing, but in all customer-facing aspects of a business.  Kerpen’s book is non-patronizing and makes the assumption that readers are already internet and social media fluent.  He provides numerous methods and examples of how to incite interaction between customer and business - and interestingly, the idea of businesses adapting a transparent but brand-identity driven social media persona.  Essentially, Kerpen’s guide shows us how to generate an interactive dialogue in which both parties - producers and consumers - can now benefit.

 

Importantly, Kerpen claims that ‘like is the new link’ - and that the ‘like’ feature of Facebook is the ideal way to generate an online community.  As in face-to-face communication, the author reminds us that communication is 50% listening and 50% talking.  He encourages us to pay attention to demographic information now available to us - including free data provided by Facebook, and Google alerts - and really understand one’s audience.  (The author lists additional resources for listening to consumers.)  Kerpen encourages us to “think and act like a consumer,” and provide incentives, like discounts, promotions, updates, and exclusive content.  This helps to generate interactivity and feedback.  Listening helps businesses provide what consumers want - it becomes a more tailored custom fit in which everyone benefits - reminding us of the increasingly fine-tuned symbiosis between product-producer and consumer.

 

After reminding businesses to view communication as a two way street - not just from the top down to a passive audience - the idea of media persona is explored.  An honest and transparent identity is key - as well as a professional and respectful demeanor.  Kerpen explains the need to respond to all bad comments quickly, and that it is necessary not just to apologize but to correct problems - 5% discounts are insulting.  What did not occur to me until reading the book was the idea that Social Media is just not marketing too for a business, and should work across all customer-facing departments:  advertising, marketing, public relations, customer service, operations, sales, research and development, senior management/CEO, information technology etc.  Ultimately, Kerpen demystifies the approach businesses should adapt for Social Media.

 

http://www.amazon.com/Likeable-Social-Media-Customers-Irresistible/dp/0071762345/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1321950060&sr=1-1

 

*Amazon Review for Extra Credit is being reviewed.

Brandraising: bring out your dead 501(c)'s, re-do 'em in Helvetica

Sarah Durham’s 2010 Brandraising: How Nonprofits Raise Visibility and Money Through Smart Communications is a comprehensive guide to developing (or redesigning) the entire brand identity for a small to medium sized organization, devoting as many pages to topics such as logos and typography as it does to online media strategy. In this way, it does what it says on the tin: the metaphoric portmanteau of ‘brandraising’ which, “like barnraising, requires everyone in your nonprofit’s community ... [to play] a role in the development of effective communications” is given an almost over-thorough treatment. For instance, Durham recommends that the imaginary receptionist be versed in the organization’s mission and personality. Hopefully they won’t need specific training.

In 1994 Durham founded Big Duck, a New York communications firm for nonprofits, and she seems to be more comfortable writing about offline communications and the overall brand experience (mailings and fundraising campaigns, boilerplate texts and elevator pitches) rather than the details of maintaining an active relationship with Twitter followers or Facebook fans. In a way, this reflects the somewhat conservative and spartan nature of many smaller nonprofits, which prefer to stick with what works (and who gives) for fundraising rather than take unproven risks in a shaky economy.  She draws attention to the different messaging channels that might be effective with the various social groups an organization must appeal to: new and prospective donors, programming clients, external media and policy-makers. It is no surprise that when writing about social networks she recommends that the brand communicator consider “where your audiences [are] now and where are they likely to be in the future” and that “perhaps participation ... is worth considering” if the audience is already comfortably connected in an existing online community.

Curiously, she spills almost twice as much ink over user generated content than social networks, an area with far more potential to be tricky. For commercial markers, pitfalls abound in this category, but perhaps the challenge of going viral is less toxic for organizations. Durham doesn’t address this issue, but is enthusiastic about various case studies (that arguably are better suited to the theme of social networks), like a Thanksgiving 2008 fundraiser on Twitter where users tweeted about their contributions of $10 for each brick to build a classroom in Tanzania or a grassroots email movement to donate money to Planned Parenthood in honor of the McCain presidential campaign picking Sarah Palin as their veep nominee.  For all her enthusiasm about viral messaging, it is frustrating that she fails to draw attention to some of the elements necessary for a successful campaign that any millennial could rattle off: simplicity, authenticity, desire to pass it along, ability to create a meme, etc.

The author’s enthusiasm about self-starting rhizomatic models for fundraising, while neglecting some of the best practices and techniques of the top-down framework to help facilitate the spread, betrays a certain technological utopianism tempered by social shaping: why wouldn’t users participate (not for the lolz but rather) for the ‘warm fuzzies’ of being involved with an organization’s mission?  Perhaps the most valuable section “connecting online with major donors” is left as a (broken) URL to a report that the author says “suggests most organizations a re missing the boat when it comes to getting gifts online from major donors.”  Oh well, hope you packed an iPad as a supplement to the book.  Along the way, there are other useful suggestions to sites for nonprofits to learn the art of social media communications, in keeping with the tone that the book is a handy primer on nonprofit communication strategy, just not a guide to winning social media skills. For that, we might need to put Big Duck on retainer.

[Note: I submitted this review to the Strand's website – the first review! – but I was not expecting it to be vetted before going live, online. That's a pretty major difference from Amazon's user-moderated space, right?]

 

Review: Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky

http://www.amazon.com/Here-Comes-Everybody-Organizing-Organizations/dp/1594201536

This past week, I read the book Malcolm Gladwell dubbed the “bible” of social media, Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. The overarching theme Shirky pushes is the power of social media to connect and mobilize its users for a common cause or reason. As Shirky explains, this is both a dream and a nightmare for marketers, as, “Consumers now talk back to businesses and speak out to the general public, and they can do so en masse and in coordinate ways,” (179). So while this gives satisfied customers a broad platform to promote the product, it also provides this same incredible platform and wide reach for negative press. Shirky provides examples of how this can go so wrong for companies, detailing disgruntled consumers who banned together on social media after negative experiences with a company to broadcast unflattering reviews to each other and everyone else in their personal networks.

Shirky also analyzes one of the earliest examples of social media marketing, the direct mail model, meaning those computer-generated emails that fill in your name to seem “personal.” These are actually still quite common today despite their many flaws (Shirky humorously notes how annoying the emails he receives to “Caly Shinky” are) (88). I believe Nancy Baym would agree with Shirky that this form of marketing is problematic, as it masquerades as synchronous communication by appearing to be personal email, but in truth, it is asynchronous since the sender is not a person that can be communicated with but a machine. Baym notes in her work that asynchronous one-on-one communications tend to have a “strange rhythm,” not to even mention how problematic the social implications are of misspelling someone’s name so blatantly in what is supposed to be a personal message.

Here Comes Everybody actually reminded me a lot of Nancy Baym’s Personal Connections in the Digital Age, as both attempted to give a very comprehensive overview of the social media realm. However, while Baym’s book was a great way to start this semester by introducing many of the concepts and theories we would be going over in the course, Shirky’s book was a bit more basic than I would have liked at this point and for this specific assignment. While Shirky did offer some interesting insights to the psychologist aspects of the mass marketing social media allows, I overall felt like I did not walk away with too much new knowledge from the book. I do want to clarify that I do not mean to say that the book was bad—I think it was just aimed more at an older generation who would not be as familiar with social media. With my personal experience and knowledge from this course, it seemed a bit like I was taking a step back rather than enriching my knowledge.

It is also a testament to the extremely quick development of social media technologies that Shirky’s book—published in 2008—read as a bit out of date.  For example, when he discussed the concept of user feedback online, the fact that he did not go into review sites such as Yelp seemed like a blatant omission, until I realized that they just probably did not exist or were not as popular at the time.

While I recognize that this review has been primarily negative, I do think Shirky’s book would be beneficial for someone unfamiliar with social networking and marketing, as it is a solid introductory guide. However, I would suggest that anyone who chooses this book would supplement their reading with more recent articles on social media marketing and trends since this book is simply older than many of today’s popular social media sites and techniques. 


- Colleen H

Review: Likeable Social Media by Dave Kerpen

Likeable Social Media: How to Delight Your Customers, Create an Irresistible Brand, and Be Generally Amazing on Facebook (And Other Social Networks)

Dave Kerpen

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0071762345/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?ie=UTF8&m=ATVPDKIKX0DER

 

Dave Kerpen’s book focuses on social media marketing, primarily through Facebook and Twitter. He elaborates on a number of strategies and general rules of social media etiquette, using personal experiences as a marketing professional and case studies of companies to illustrate his points. Kerpen emphasizes that social media is an efficient means to be in direct communication with consumers. Companies can hear what customers are saying and have the opportunity to address their feedback. Facebook and Twitter have the potential to establish relationships on a more personal level, thus it is important for companies to take advantage of this by engaging the customer and to be authentic online with a voice corresponding to the brand’s identity.

 

Kerpen’s book certainly provides useful information for companies looking to develop their social media marketing strategies. He points out functions of Facebook and Twitter that the regular user may not be aware of, such as targeted advertising through Facebook and being able to use Twitter essentially as a tool for tracking trends and other market research. His advice for how companies should present itself on social media and how to effectively interact with consumers sometimes seems obvious from the perspective of a frequent user of social media. Consumers are much more likely to engage with a brand that seems approachable and human rather than one that seems aloof. Likeable Social Media, though, would undoubtedly be helpful for brands just starting to shape their online identity.

 

Overall, the book does prove that a social media component is essential to any successful company’s marketing plan. Consumers are used to conducting relationships online, and it is becoming more natural for them to seek a relationship with the products and services they use through online media as well. By taking advantage of the capabilities of social media, companies can interact with their customers on a more direct and frequent level. This additional connection allows brands to get a better sense of what their customers are thinking and to provide a deeper level of customer service. Kerpen also encourages marketers to come up with innovative ways to keep their customers engaged with the technologies that social media affords them. For instance, a customer of Uno Chicago Grill posted on the company’s Facebook page that she would be going to one of the restaurants for her birthday; the location where she had a reservation had a birthday cake waiting when she arrived. In turn, the customer shared her positive experience through all of her own social networks, providing the company with invaluable word-of-mouth publicity.


-Cindy H.

Friends With Benefits

Friends With Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook
Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo
Found on Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/Friends-Benefits-Social-Marketing-Handbook/dp/1593271999

Social media platforms have exploded over the past few years, sending millions of people around the globe to the Internet to connect with each other. Given the number of people flocking to these websites, businesses have begun looking for ways to promote their products and services via social media. This is where Friends With Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook comes in handy. Written by the cofounders of a marketing agency, Friends With Benefits offers a step-by-step guide on how marketers can enter the world of social media and utilize platforms like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter to their advantage.

Friends With Benefits is broken into chapters that delve into different types of social media such as RSS feeds, blogs, as well as the traditional sites. The authors provide information about how to interact with blogs, netiquette, how to use social media in your pitch, how to monitor and analyze your social media marketing efforts, and breakdowns of the most popular social media sites and their marketing uses. The book stresses that social media can: bring more visitors to your website, more incoming links to your website, more RSS subscribe, more views of your content on video and photo sharing sites, better search engine optimization, and more genuine interactions with your customers as long as you follow the two social media laws – transparency and authenticity.

It seems that the majority of the advice offered in the book is from personal and professional experience. The authors note how many social media campaigns they have helped lead as well as noting case studies for topics like netiquette and crisis management. The underlying message is that social media – in most cases –should be an add-on to the marketing campaign, not the whole campaign. Given that their knowledge comes from real world professional experience as well as well-known examples, I believe the authors to be credible sources.

Overall I believe the book is most useful for marketers who are less connected with social media and perhaps new to it. The way the authors break down what each website is and how to use it seems elementary and unnecessary for a younger generation. The strategies that are explained are very similar to traditional marketing tactics, just via a different conduit. In this way I’m not sure who is sitting down and reading this book besides Ivy and me.

I would be curious to ask someone like danah boyd what she thinks of Barefoot and Szabo’s account of social media marketing. boyd writes that what makes social media sites pervasive and popular are their nature of persistence, replicability, and searchability. These can have the ability to work either for or against marketers, depending on how well they are able to stay transparent and authentic. Companies certainly have an incentive to tap into social media sites, but where is the line and how ethical is the infiltration into people’s – albeit online – social lives.

S.Nelson

Mobile Marketing Playbook by 360i

Reading the Mobile Marketing Playbook truly feels like thumbing through a carefully detailed and well thought-out strategy for influencing a consumer’s behavior from his or her cell phone. This book was authored by the capable staff at 360i, a digital marketing agency with years of experience creating digital campaigns for Fortune 500 companies. Written at the end of 2010 the Mobile Marketing Playbook draws on observations from the boom of iPhone and Android based devices. By noting at the outset, and at multiple points throughout the book, that every year is predicted to be “the year of mobile”, the Mobile Marketing Playbook inserts itself into the timeline of digital media as an important book to have around.

Though I have been a mobile phone user for years, there were quite a few points that 360i brought up that surprised me. For example, the book dedicates a chapter to marketing through searches on mobile devices. The search engine optimization (SEO) principles that generally work on browsers on a desktop might be different on a smaller, more mobile screen. The book advises that marketers “get to the point faster” since mobile users aren’t searching for a leisurely perusal of a website. Mobile users are in motion, and need their information as soon as possible. Additionally, smaller screens and touchier keyboards mean that searchers keep their query character count short. This can drastically change the SEO strategy. Using points like these, the authors of this book proved that they were approaching new mobile media analytically and practically.

I was disappointed that there weren’t more anecdotes that exemplified how the book’s advice helped 360i with its mobile marketing efforts, but the logic provided is sound. The authors also used a number of studies by reputable firms like Nielsen and Merkle to prove its main points. Every chapter was framed by statistics, like the chapter on social mobile marketing, which begins, “more than 150 million people access Facebook from mobile devices each month,” which is a statistic provided by Facebook.

This book outlines a clear-cut strategy for its audience of marketing professionals. Using a combination of sensible goals, cited statistics and the credibility that comes from years of experience, as well as outside interviews contributed by working professionals, 360i’s Mobile Marketing Playbook is an excellent resource for those looking to beef up their marketing efforts with mobile outreach. However, this book briefly glosses over some of the very real pitfalls of mobile marketing in the very last chapter. Issues such as the incredible speed at which mobile technologies are changing, the resources marketing departments need to invest to make a mobile marketing campaign successful and the fact that “the year of mobile” might have already happened don’t get nearly as much attention as they should.

Despite this oversight, 350i’s Mobile Marketing Playbook provides a good overview for those interested in trying out mobile marketing. Its industry specific predictions and case studies are invaluable guidance in the quickly changing world of mobile technologies.

Roxanne Dyer

Book online: http://blog.360i.com/pov/mobile-marketing-playbook

My review at bn.com: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/mobile-marketing-playbook-360i/1026820410?ean=2940011107825&itm=1&usri=mobile+marketing+playbook

Review of 'Guerilla Social Media Marketing'

Guerilla Social Media Marketing: 100+ Weapons to Grow Your Online Influence, Attract Customers, and Drive Profits by Jay Conrad Levinson and Shane Gibson is a guide to applying the principles of “guerilla marketing” to current social media technologies to create an effective, engaging marketing plan fit for the digital age. The term “guerilla marketing,” coined in 1984, means using “cost-efficient, creative, and innovative strategies” instead of traditional forms of broadcast advertising to draw in customers and clients (1). Since many digital tools can be accessed and utilized for little to no cost, social media is the perfect outlet for guerilla marketing tactics. Throughout the book, Levinson and Gibson repeatedly note that consumer trust comes from constant engagement with both the company and other consumers, and not one-way pitching, a point expressed in the other readings by Clemons, Mangold & Faulds, and Kozinets last week. The authors argue that guerilla marketers must be willing to invest a lot of time in maintaining their company’s social media presence, because every interaction is a potential branding opportunity: if you take too long to respond to a customer’s question or comment, it may be construed as inattentiveness or ignoring and thus turn into a negative experience for the customer. It is also important, say Levinson and Gibson, to be authentic and consistent across all of your social media platforms, making sure you come across as a real, human person with whom customers can interact directly and that genuinely cares about their concerns.

 

This book was written in a concise but witty style that brought the authors’ points across clearly and effectively. Levinson and Gibson used well-chosen real-life success stories of guerilla social media marketing, gave comprehensive overviews of many popular (and some obscure) social media tools, and even provided blank “progress charts” for the reader to fill in as they built their own social media marketing plan. However, I felt that at times the authors were a bit repetitive and stressed the same ideas over and over again with slightly different wording. The 234 pages of text could probably have been cut down a bit and still made all of their points. The book also appears to be written for an older audience that may not be as familiar with social media tools as people in our age range, so for me the sections that addressed how to use Facebook and Twitter were quite basic and didn’t really teach me anything I didn’t already know.  

 

Levinson and Gibson talk a lot about constant engagement with your customers and making sure that you are Tweeting, blogging, and updating more often than your competitors. They don’t, however, address the possibility of over-saturation. I find that if I “like” or follow a company on Facebook or Twitter and their updates are constantly blowing up my feed, I’m less inclined to continue following them. Not only does no one have the time to read every single update, but people often get annoyed with too many communication attempts. I agree with the authors’ idea of being quick to respond to customer questions and complaints, but they could suggest finding the right balance between more frequent customer engagement and too much engagement.

 

I believe the main ideas in this book line up well particularly with two of Nancy Baym’s major social discourses of new technology. The discourse of social construction of technology states that “technologies arise from social processes,” meaning that the social contexts of any given time or place affect technologies and their uses (Baym 39). Like Clemons, Levinson and Gibson suggest that we are living in a social context where people no longer trust traditional one-way advertising; thus, social media technologies, which encourage interactive communication between customers and companies (and other customers) have become effective marketing tools that adapt to the social values of our time. The second discourse, domestication, arises when a technology is accepted and taken for granted in society. Levinson and Gibson write from a perspective that expresses the ubiquity of social media: a good percentage of your company’s customers are online and using social media as part of their daily lives, so marketers need to take advantage of that and use social media to reach them.

 

Amazon link to book: http://www.amazon.com/Guerrilla-Social-Media-Marketing-Influence/dp/1599183838/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1321909726&sr=8-1

 

-Nicole -- @nmf255