Feature photo by Todd Huffman
Last week my friend (and one of my co-founders on a new company we’re launching in early January), Monica O’Brien, published her first paperback book, Social Pollination: Escape the Hype of Social Media and Join the Companies Winning At It, and I wanted to give a quick shout for her. The book is a thorough guide to social media marketing for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and PR and marketing folks.
Social Pollination is about how small businesses can and should be using social media – starting with creating goals and strategy, to the optimizing the 12 social media success factors on any platform, to measuring social media ROI, all the way to building a social media team when you see that social media is so much more important than advertising for 2010.
In her introduction Monica explains what the concept of social pollination is, and details several common social media mistakes to avoid—not creating a strategy, thinking the tools themselves are everything, gathering followers versus building a network, being too impersonal, being overly controlling of your community, abusing permission, and more.
She goes on to explain the necessity of using social media, how it is changing the way businesses do marketing, and how to properly share your message in a way that consumers trust.
Monica reviews goals and strategy and shows how social media will help you raise brand awareness, demonstrate thought leadership, create a sales pipeline, increase the loyalty of your community, and give you new avenues for customer support, recruiting, and R&D.
She then breaks down the many different kinds of new media, such as blogs, microblogging, social networks, bookmarking sites, and many other kinds of special-interest site and sites for specific types of multimedia. She describes the importance of building a community founded upon relationships, the psychology behind why people will or won’t share your content, ideas for developing your content, keyword research, on- and off-page search engine optimization techniques, and how to measure and analyze your performance.
If you’re new to promoting your business on social media, check out the book on Amazon. And if you’re curious about the process of writing, pricing, and marketing a paperback, Monica has an interesting behind-the-scenes look at her new book on her blog.
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Additionally, I’ve recently become a staff writer for SocialMediaMarketing.com. You can follow my guest articles there for more about social media marketing strategy if you’re interested. Check out my first few posts at SMM and leave me your feedback:
Congrats on the staff writer thingie! I’ll put the book in my bookmarks, which probably means I’ll never read it, but I can’t dilute myself now. I’m working hard on my new blog and my goal is to be as authentic as possible. I think that alone will take me far. Keep the posts coming dear sir. I shall devour them!
Ah… Social media! Social media seems so time consuming to me. I’m sure I have yet to learn the best ways to work and create a healthy social media network.
I feel like I spend so much time plowing through Twitter links, Facebook posts, and RSS feeds that I don’t get much done in the day. To date, reading blogs and leaving posts has worked the best for drawing traffic to my blog on lifestyle development.
Perhaps there is a better way…
Echoing Henri here…congrats on the new staff writing position!
Cody, thanks for the shout out to my book! Congrats on the new writing position as well. I read some of your stuff over at SMM – you are very knowledgeable on using social media.
Shows that there are so many different ways to reach an audience. At present more noise in the market. Everyday we see thousands of competing messages. We need to do something different to stand out. We are possibly experiencing and for some enjoying the greatest change in the way we market and communicate more now than ever.