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