Do Not Get Laid On Your First Facebook Date
The title might be slightly misleading, but Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo started it – their new book is called “Getting to first base – a Social Media Marketing Playbook“. Besides, I wanted to make it rhyme. And it gives me another reason to include this picture.
As a blogger, although a relatively new and obscure one, I was lucky enough to receive e free copy of their e-book for review. And that’s what I like about this book and its authors. They practice what they preach. I’ve been giving a few workshops about blogging and like to think I’m starting to understand the undercurrent of the blogosphere, but until recently all my knowledge came from reading. That’s when I decided I had to get into blogging, to not just read and try to understand, but to get involved and actually understand.
The way Julie en Darren have gone about promoting their book shows that what they write about works. Just look how they sweet talked David Armano into writing about their book on his blog -a blog with over 3,000 rss subscribers! This not ony shows that their writings make sense, but they work!
In their book they use dating and getting into a relationship as a metaphor to explain how a social media marketer, or any marketer looking to dip his toes into the online media landscape, should behave in order to be listened to and to be good at his job. By constantly comparing how a social media campaign follows a similar path to dating they make it easy to consume and perfectly understandable.
Another reason why this metaphor works so well is because social media is very personal. Take blogging for example, it’s an extremely personal medium. The only person the blogger has to answer to is himself. Well and his audience obviously. In general bloggers write about what interests them, about what they know. That’s why a standardised press release will never work with bloggers. Traditional media is highly competitive and they have to get the latest stories, bloggers simply write whatever they want to write. A normal press release is likely to end up in the bin. By making it more personal you can get the blogger’s attention, as is shown by the little note they e-mailed to David Armano.
Seth Godin writes about this in his new book ‘Meatball Sundae’ – how you shouldn’t use traditional marketing and apply it to social media. It doesn’t work and is likely to backfire. You don’t have to get involved, but if you do – do it right!
Becoming successful in social media as a marketer means getting involved, building relationships and getting people to trust you and not to betray that trust once its established.
So for anybody who wants to understand how social media works and how you can best use it to your advantage this book should be on top of your list. By the way, when I say advantage I don’t mean that in a ‘only one side profits’, but just how social media can be best utilised to become an effective marketing strategy.
It’s an excellent guidebook for someone taking his or her first steps into the world of social media and social media marketing.
You can buy the book at Social Media Ready
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Hey Daan and Igor,
I enjoyed the review of the eBook, seems like a good source for getting a better grasp of this viral thing.
But I wanted to ask you guys about seeding. It seems for the creative aspect of viral marketing there is a growing wealth of information.
But I haven’t found a lot of resources about seeding, which it seems to me is the toughest part of the game. What are your thoughts on seeding?
Totally agree about being personal.
Our worlds are so interconnected and over communicated to that one of the only ways to cut through the noise is through being personal.
Eg Gary Vaynerchuck responding to emails personally or Tim Sykes creating a personal link to his community with his outrageous personality.
So many people are going around talking about
“getting involved in the conversation” etc..
And although I agree with that to a certain extent,
I think that success in social media has alot to do with another one of Seth Godin’s books called Tribes.
In music marketing, many people make the mistake that they can just “get signed” to a big company etc without realizing that the main surefire way to get to success is to serve a musical tribe first and then grow out of that.
So in a social media sense, its about blogging/tweeting… but also doing alot more 2 way traffic activities- finding where people are hanging out and getting stuck in to that.