"Social Media Marketing for Dummies" - A Review

We’ve come a long way in five short years. As a college sophomore in spring 2005, I finally joined the latest E-trend to be sweeping campus: Facebook. Back then, Facebook was open only to college students, and this was enforced by requiring a .edu email address to register.

My communications professors kept informing us that advertising, public relations, and marketing (collectively Integrated Marketing Communications) were evolving into a two-way model. That is, consumers were utilizing various channels—mainly digital—to communicate both with each other and with the movers and shakers behind their favorite brands. What consumers are saying ultimately drives tactics, objectives, and strategies in contemporary IMC.

Today YouTube, Twitter, MySpace, Helium, LinkedIn, Facebook, and plenty other social networking sites dominate the internet scene. Marketers have taken notice and are actively engaging consumers on this level. I “like” quite a few of my favorite brands on Facebook and follow their feeds regularly.

So I asked myself, do I really understand what new media is all about and where it’s going? Do I really grasp the concept of marketing through digital dialogue and downloads? I decided to find out.

Shiv Singh’s Social Media Marketing for Dummies seemed like a good place to start. The book cites data from winter 2009, making it structurally still relevant, even if social media has evolved quite a bit since then. The book is in the usual “For Dummies” format, meaning easy-reading, blocky paragraphs; relevant tables, charts, and visuals; and plenty of stupid “5th Wave” cartoons.

Singh turns out to be quite an IMC guru, and how he applies that knowledge to the evolving media landscape is quite helpful for anyone asking, “What are Facebook, MySpace, Twitter?” and, “How in the heck can they further the bottom line?” Personally, I discovered that I understand social media marketing concepts better than I thought I did. That’s not to say I didn’t learn a lot from this book, particularly in campaign metrics, mobile communications, and social media to further corporate internal communications. The text is heavily peppered with hyperlinks, those of which are “hot” when reading the E-book on a WiFi-enabled device.

Overall, Social Media Marketing is a good read 'n reference. It contains a wealth of information and trying to employ all of the treated topics at once could be overwhelming. But as a marketer builds a social media campaign, I envision him returning to this book.  It contains a lot of info that will become necessary as a social media campaign grows.  If there was one disappointment I had with the book, it was the number of glaring typos. 

Singh closes out the book with a final chapter dedicated to previewing several blogs that deal with social media topics. Bloggers range from social media gurus, to AdAge, to Singh’s own blog. Excellent way to end a book that potentially was turning obsolete before it rolled off the presses.

DELIVERY FORMAT

I purchased Social Media Marketing through Sony’s E-reader Store. Previously, I’ve used my E-Reader for library E-books and lengthy PDF documents. The credit card transaction was fast and easy as buying and downloading a song on iTunes, and I was reading in minutes. However, a book like this I’d still rather have on my bookshelf. It’s something I’d envision being a reference point, at least for a year or so, until a more current version comes out. Visuals were a little bit hard to see at times, too. The electronic format was, however, useful for allowing clickable hyperlinks within the text.