Book Review: The Social Media Marketing Book from O’Reily

Posted on 15. Feb, 2010 by Divya Uttam in Blog, Reviews

the social media marketing bookDan Zarrella with his book “The Social Media Marketing Book” introduces social media and guides on how best to use this media for the marketing of your business. Almost anyone can practice the workable solutions provided in the book, and make sense of the complicated social media environment.

For anybody who is new to social media marketing Zarrella introduces each basic building blocks of social media, including blogs; multi-media; microblogging; social networking; social news and bookmarking, in different sections. Within each section, Zarrella introduces a tool, talks about its history, and describes the protocols, features and functionality with the help of screenshots, graphs, and visual explanations.

The book is lean and with 224 pages of which half of them are screenshots and images, it is indeed a highly-tactical guide of significant value to any individual or organization looking to get into social media. The book also does a good job of showing the difference between different social media sites, such as pure networking (LinkedIn, Facebook), media sharing (YouTube, Flickr), blogs, microblogging, and bookmarking (Reddit, Delicious, Digg) and more.

Throughout the book, there is good advice and it tells you what works and does not work. Zarrella makes an observation that is crucial to ones success for a business use of Facebook. He notes that for businesses, the best social media marketing is always going to be done by your fans, not by you. on the topic of forums, he reiterates the importance of fans, writing that a business should not underestimate the power of networks of niche forums to drive impressive numbers of visitors to your site. Once again, the best promotion comes not from the business, but from its fans.

The chapters on strategy and measurement have some good piece of advice. He discusses of “call to action” (CTA) in which the marketer, tries to engage visitors on the website. He also stresses on the importance of goals and describes several tools you can use to measure return on investment and engagement as a result of your social media marketing efforts.

The book does justice to social media tools but could have also emphasized more on the social graph (people, relationships and conversations) the focal point of social media. The human element of social media could have been better explained on the interaction with consumers, clients, and potential leads through social media tools.

There are loads of interesting and useful tips in this book.  Zarrella also provides anecdotes from various social media gurus and notables to share their wisdom along with classic examples of Comcast, Zappos and Dell.

About Dan Zarrella

Dan Zarrella currently works as a marketing product owner at HubSpot. He has written extensively about the science of viral marketing, memetics and social media on his own blog (danzarrella.com) and for a variety of popular industry blogs.

“There is a lack of practical, tactical advice on marketing bookshelves concerning social media,” says Zarrella (@DanZarrella). Rather than talk about just ‘engaging in the conversation’ I wanted to give readers a hands-on introduction to the social web and what it can do to impact their business’s bottom line.”

He continues: “Young people today are spending enormous amounts of time on social networks and in the changing world of marketing their status as digital natives can make them valuable assets to businesses. This book can be the first step for turning social networking addiction into a marketable skill.”

Guy Kawasaki, co-founder of Alltop.com truly says “Let Zarrella take you to social-media marketing school. You’ll learn more from reading this book than a month of research on the Internet.”

Blogging for beginners

Posted on 29. Sep, 2009 by Divya Uttam in How To Guides

Here is a small but useful checklist for all the beginner bloggers. The list has been divided into 4 stages.

Preparation

  • Fix a day to post – to be regular
  • Simple Keyword Research on the topic (One can use Google Keyword Tool)
  • Keep in mint the target audience of your post while deciding the topic
  • Check if the topic has been written before. Only write if you have something unique to say
  • Register your blog on Technorati.com, Blogcatalogue.com, Bloglines.com
  • Fix RSS feed with feedburner
  • Open accounts on Social News sites like Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, Furl

Writing the post

  • Keep in mind the point you want to make out of the post
  • Make the Blog Title attractive yet explainative
  • Try to use your primary keyword in the post
  • Use Positive Voice
  • Invite Comments at the end of the post. Leave enough for people to comment
  • Double check your links. Do not lead people to dead links.
  • If you quote somebody, give a link to the page you quoted from
  • Check the post for actionable insights
  • Double Checke Spelling and Grammar

Posting

  • Use Related Keyword in the alt tag of the pictures you use
  • Link to Related Posts on your blog and offsite
  • Check the vibe and the flow of the post
  • Put in relevant Categories and Tags

Post Posting

  • Share on:
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • MyBlogLog

To read more about Blogging chaeck out the following links –

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/02/14/blogging-for-beginners-2/

http://www.chrisbrogan.com/23-essential-elements-of-sharable-blog-posts/