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