Friends with Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook

The way I see it, there's a lot of excessive optimism in the material out there on Social Media. There's a lot of cheerleading about the free advertising and the engagement with customers, but not enough acknowledgement of the enormous investment of skilled man-hours many social media tactics require to bear fruit. Social Media boosters may be aware that real marketers want to know what the ROI will be, and to please us they have some convenient, practiced answers. The truth is you cannot realistically outsource your company's social media branding to people earning $2 an hour who don't have a reason to care if your company looks stupid. If you go for the bottom-rung, quantity-over-quality approach to social media you'll get a messy result. The other alternative, as in most advertising, is to put the right MONEY into social media. Since intelligent employees who "get it" must be paid, and since social media is a time-consuming type of marketing, you won't be getting free advertising the way you're hoping. This book is excellent. My expectations were low, because much of what I read on social media marketing hypes the free advertising and avoids addressing the labor-intensity of it. This book is a breath of fresh air because it addresses real problems that can and will occur in social media marketing and how to deal with them. Now that I've had my rant, I'll just recommend the book with a 5 star (a rating I'm getting stingier and stingier with). That means it's really useful stuff.

In case you haven't heard, social media marketing is the new way to be doing marketing these days. Unfortunately, many companies are afraid of those oh so terrible risks involved when entering the realm of social media. But authors Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo get it right when they say, "The real risk is pretending that the social media revolution isn't happening. That only puts you further behind your competitors and impedes your relationship with existing and new customers" (p. 129). Right on. I couldn't agree more. So you know you need to get involved in social media marketing. How? "Friends with Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook" is a great resource to begin with. Throughout the book, I definitely got the sense that the author's are speaking from experience. Many of the suggestions seem carefully thought out, ones that the authors tried themselves. The first few chapters help you to understand what social media is and why it's important. Then the book dives into a discussion of how to enter communities, develop relationships with bloggers, and successfully build social capital with your target market. I thought the advice on how to contact bloggers about your products without seeming like a spammer was particularly helpful. The author's also included chapters on online repuation management, metrics (i.e., measuring your online marketing success), MySpace, Facebook, video marketing, Twitter, and "participating in online communities" (info on using social news sites, social bookmarking sites, etc.). One of the things I most appreciated about the book was the authors' frankness about the pitfalls of social media marketing. Don't get me wrong: the authors don't waste chapters expounding the dangers of social media marketing. (As I mentioned, the biggest danger is doing nothing about social media.) Rather, they make sure to point out some common mistakes along the way. Avoid these mistakes, and you'll save yourself from having some enormous headaches later on. If you're looking for some solid information on how to begin your social media marketing efforts, "Friends with Benefits" will not disappoint. Even if you already have experience in this area, you're sure to find useful bits of wisdom.

I know that I should do more social media marketing for my own business. I do some, but I don't really do all that I could. The reason is that I have a distaste for spammy marketing. You know, "get 4 gazillion Facebook followers!" and all that sort of thing. The sleazy Internet marketers have really turned me off. On the other hand, I am reminded of a young women who does Tweets for a few local businesses here. She announces restaurant specials, provides links of interest for the people who follow her husbands computer repair business, and just does amusing reminders every now and then. I follow her tweets because I want to know about the things she posts. It's not annoying - she's doing it the right way, and that's exactly the sort of thing that this book suggests. There's nothing spammy here, nothing that makes me uncomfortable (and I'm more than a little squeamish on this subject). Anyone with a business, whether it's Big Business or just you working out of your living room, can benefit from the advice in this book. No sleaze, just practical advice about how to market well using social media. This would be a great introduction for anyone who can't imagine why Twitter, Facebook et al. could be good for business, but it will also be useful for fine tuning the efforts of those who are already using the Web to enhance their marketing.

When I started my social media mar­ket­ing firm three years ago I had an advan­tage. By autumn, 2006, I had passed through New Media Strate­gies as Tech­nol­ogy Strate­gist and Edelman's elite Pub­lic Affairs Online Advo­cacy team. Even so, my busi­ness part­ner, Mark Har­ri­son, and I made a lot of mis­takes, walked through mine fields, and even­tu­ally started tak­ing more hills than we lost. I started Abra­ham Har­ri­son almost exactly three years ago and I would have really appre­ci­ated Friends with Ben­e­fits: A Social Media Mar­ket­ing Hand­book by Dar­ren Bare­foot and Julie Szabo. Actu­ally, I am kind of bummed that I didn't write this book myself because I cer­tainly could have and should have -- but I didn't. (Via Mar­ket­ing Con­ver­sa­tion) Friends with Ben­e­fits spoke to me because I have "lonely nerd" deep inside of me and this book goes all the way back into the yes­ter­years of 80s com­put­ing when I, too, was surf­ing the proto-Inter­net via a 1200-baud modem. Like the book asserts in chap­ter one, we lonely nerds weren't lonely, "the early BBSs were actu­ally very social" and so were we. Fast-forward from the early 80s -- when I was doing dial-up and geek­ing out in Hon­olulu Bul­letin Board Sys­tems -- twenty years and "social media" is invented. No, re-invented. Dar­ren Bare­foot and Julie Szabo get it and they lay it all out into this book and basi­cally wrote the book on start­ing and build­ing Abra­ham Har­ri­son -- or a firm or agency like it -- from scratch. And not just start­ing an agency but inte­grat­ing social media mar­ket­ing into your adver­tis­ing or PR agency or even adding smart social media capac­ity into your big, medium or even small busi­ness. I am impressed. Accord­ing to the book, "social media mar­ket­ing is using social media chan­nels to pro­mote your com­pany and its prod­ucts. This type of mar­ket­ing should be a sub­set of your online mar­ket­ing activ­i­ties, com­ple­ment­ing tra­di­tional web-based pro­mo­tional strate­gies like email newslet­ters and online adver­tis­ing cam­paigns. Social media mar­ket­ing qual­i­fies as a form of viral or word-of-mouth mar­ket­ing." The goal of Friends with Ben­e­fits is to take social media, social media mar­ket­ing, viral mar­ket­ing, and word-of-mouth mar­ket­ing and answer "so what" and "what now?" What I like about this book is that it is not a book on Twit­ter or Face­book. It answers what and why with a how that is com­pre­hen­sive and includes geekier-but-essential top­ics such as RSS, cor­po­rate blog­ging, and even social media news releases. The real value of the book kicks in in chap­ter 3, "Flag­ging a Ride: Find­ing the Right Blog­gers and Com­mu­ni­ties" when the book goes into the explicit details sur­round­ing blog­ger dis­cov­ery, blog­ger prospect­ing, how to choose the right blog and blog­ger based on their type (per­sonal, top­i­cal, or cor­po­rate) and pop­u­lar­ity (size mat­ters), includ­ing how best to judge blog­gers and bl