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badly-behaving corporations to their proverbial knees. I love how an uplifting video can beam across humanity and infuse people with the gift of hope. I love that nice guys, good companies and worthy organizations finish first. I love how this new generation is using social media to move mountains. I love how charitable organizations are using social media to save lives. I love the positive impact it has on our world—and the promise it holds for our future. That’s what I love about social media.
Now, here’s what I don’t love: the pie-crust promises (easily made, easily broken). Social media isn’t the silver bullet it is often ballyhooed to be. The promise social media holds is matched by the hype and hyperbole that envelops it. It’s the Wild West out there. Like the dot-com days of the late 1990s, many people have completely lost their minds. People in social media aren’t just drinking the Kool-Aid, they’re scuba diving in it. They cannot see what they cannot see. They’ll look at spectacular successes such as Barack Obama’s social media-driven presidential campaign or Dell’s sales success on Twitter or the Egypt revolution and think, “Wow, if social media can do those things, imagine the number of irregular pants I can sell using Twitter and Facebook!”
The reality is social media is tough, complex and nuanced. You can work your irregular pants off and see nary a result for months.
William Shakespeare said: “Expectation is the root of all heartache.” Every day, good-hearted, well-intentioned, hard-working business owners set up their Twitter and Facebook pages, their hearts brimming with hope, and then…crickets. The gap between expectation and reality in social media is a Grand Canyon-like chasm, and that often leaves people feeling deflated and disillusioned.
That’s a shame because with realistic expectations and the right mix of planning, patience, and persistence, social media can be a personal and professional bonanza. If you know what you want, stick to timeless truths, embrace the process, come from the heart, watch the data and work hard, social media can confer great benefit. It may not come in ways you expected, but it will come.
If, however, you succumb to what I call “monumental myths,” you can lose time, lose money and lose face.
About the book
Who it’s for
On the just-invented, non-scientific social media savvy scale, my dad is a 1; Seth Godin is a 10. This book is for a wide swath of folks in the 2-8 range. More specifically:
If back-linking, back-channeling or blog-rolling makes you giddy with excitement, this book is probably not for you.
If you consider yourself a member of the Twitterati, please put this book down and back away.
If you measure your success in life by how many people re-blog you on Tumblr, you need to get out more (and, no, this book is not for you).
However:
If you are cynical, skeptical or curious about social media and want to know what all the fuss is about, this book is probably for you.
If you want to break out and parlay your passion into a viable business, this book is almost certainly for you.
If you own a business, and/or work in marketing, advertising or public relations, this book is absolutely for you.
While social media has ascended to the #1 online activity (sorry, porn, but you don’t deserve the top spot) and most people know what it is, they don’t fully understand how it works. My father knows about Twitter, but he looks at the page like there’s a large, tropical insect clinging to it, about to spray venom on his face. Sorry, Dad, but this book is not for you.
What’s in it
This book will introduce you to social media in a warm, welcoming, non-venomous way. It will explain, in plain language, how social media can benefit you personally and professionally. It will reveal where the landmines are and how to step around them. It will relate some incredible stories that prove you have a voice and you can have an impact, that your words can change the world. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.”
Whenever, and for whatever reasons, you decide to engage in social media, this book presents timeless truths that will apply this week, this month and in ten years. It’s topical, but timeless.
Why I wrote it
In 1937, Dale Carnegie wrote How to Win Friends and Influence People. It sits at my bedside dog-eared and soggy from all the times I read it while partaking of a deep soak. Regardless of where I am in my career, the principles in that book always seem to apply. They’re timeless.
It’s early in social media. It’s hot and trendy right now. There are a number of books pushing the quick wins or touting the tool of the day. Unfortunately, they’re dated by the time they hit the digital bookshelves. I sought to write one of the first classics, a book with timeless principles that will resonate with you and with future generations, just as Win Friends resonates with me seven decades after publication. The concepts here are principle-centric, not time-specific. If my young daughter finds it relevant twenty years from now, I will have succeeded.
That’s not to say this book isn’t current. It is a veritable treasure trove of up-to-date information packed with clear, actionable insights and case studies to help you get the most from social media.
James Joyce once said, “Mistakes are the portals of discovery.” If that’s true, oh the discoveries I’ve made! That’s actually another catalyst for this book. Our agency has represented an array of companies from small businesses to multinational corporations, and in that time we made several promises on which social media could not deliver. In our enthusiasm, we bought into the hyper-fueled hysteria that fuels social media. We’ve learned a lot since then, and I’m bringing what we’ve learned to these pages so you can avoid these costly mistakes.
How I wrote it
I suppose you could call me a social media outlier. I got into this space early, and I’ve spent thousands of hours submerged in social media, both personally and on behalf of our agency’s clients. I’ve read dozens of books and thousands of articles, mining them for universal principles that would stand the test of time and help anyone understand and use social media. This book is a distillation of all of that.
I analyzed the most successful people and businesses in social media to identify the common threads of what they do differently from those who don’t rise above the din. That’s in here, too, as I share some wonderful, yet applicable social media success stories.
Finally, I listened…to you. You have been instrumental in this book’s creation. I blogged several chapters, and you provided valuable feedback on what you wanted to see. Most of you requested actionable insights. You asked for proven strategies, efficient tactics and best practices, and you wanted to know how to put that all into play. That’s in here.
My mission is to bring old-school business practices to new media, and I see a real mass-market hunger for that. People demand authenticity, honesty, and integrity from the brands with which they do business. They want companies to treat them with respect and decency. I suppose we all want what my grandpa delivered more than fifty years ago: good, old-fashioned customer service.
In this brave, new world-of-mouth economy, I’ve discovered that good business is indeed good for business.
Introduction
Social media: From prehistoric paint to present-day posts
“Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.” —Anne Morrow Lindbergh (American writer and aviation pioneer, 1906-2001)
The desire to connect and communicate is woven into our very genetic code as human beings. We don’t want to be heard, we need to be