My review of "The Social Media Marketing Book" by Dan Zarrella

For social media marketing week, I read the cleverly titled "The Social Media Marketing Book" by Dan Zarrella. This book was a bit basic in regards to its chapters on the different facets of social media (blogs, microblogs, social networks, etc), however the last two chapters claimed to provide some insight into strategy, tactics, and analytics, so I hoped that they would be beneficial.

One topic he discusses in these last chapters is the call to action, or CTA. A CTA is “an invitation you make to your website visitors to engage in some type of action that benefits your business aims––and hopefully theirs, too” (Zarrella 201). This is the sort of concept seen in practice everyday (business Facebook pages encouraging users to "Like Us!" for instance). That a major social media marketing author is encouraging the same practice suggests that I have been correct in how I have “read” social media marketing just through interaction with Facebook and Twitter pages.

Another discussion that I hoped would be of interest to me as a social media marketing intern was a section on campaigns versus ongoing strategy. I have worked on a few social media campaigns in my social media marketing internship and hoped that this section would provide some insight on how to be structure campaigns, however Zarrella merely offers, "[Campaigns] should fit within your ongoing strategy and have specific goals and finite timelines" (197). This extremely obvious answer was sort of aggravating and patronizing.

I would not recommend this book whatsoever. I've never been burned so bad by online shopping. This book features a screenshot photo every-other page, barely any text, and definitely stretches the borders of objectivity. Zarrella does disclose early in the book that he works for a "software startup" called HubSpot (7) and gives some statistics on its reach. This helps to frame him as an expert, however in the section blogs, he discusses different types of blog hosting (hosted versus self-hosted) and gives some examples such as WordPress and Blogger. He then adds in a section about HubSpot, essentially using this space as an advertisement for his company which I found to be a bit crass. Unless you have no experience with social media, I would suggest to look for a different book for an outlook on social media marketing. This book is borderline advertisement, too photo heavy, and not very informative overall.