Tag Archives: permission marketing

3 Must-Read books for social media marketers

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I don’t think I have read any fiction in over a decade.   Real life interests me more than stories about it.  You would never know I was an English major by looking at my home library. Since I have been teaching some social media business topics lately, it seems that I am called upon to provide handouts with links and useful tidbits, so I have started putting together a list of essential books that relate to the subject:

41-0CC6UJqL._SL160_ The Cluetrain Manifesto: 10th Anniversary Edition
Written  over 10 years ago by Internet visionaries,Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger,Cluetrain could have very easily been written a few months ago.  I lost my orignal copy and had to replace it with the updated 2009, 10th anniversary edition.  Cluetrain is the Bible of Web 2.0 Marketing and PR.  You can read it online free here.  Manifesto item number one sets the tone of the book:   Markets are Conversations.

sethpermissionPermission Marketing : Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers , by Seth Godin.  Also published in 2009, Godin’s assault on push (or interruption) marketing has withstood the test of time.   The book helped me understand the power of Opt-In,  gave me a good basis for my early explorations in Internet marketing, and fostered a healthy attitude for working in the social media.

The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business by Tara Hunt, is my latest read. It seems that the term “social capital” keeps popping up these days.  Well, Whuffie IS social capital, and this book is about building it, working for it earning it and putting it to proper use.  Whuffie is the currency of Social Media and  Web 2.0 Marketing.  Whether you are  a new media neophyte, or a power user who “gets it”, I think you will find this book to be an interesting read.

There are no magic bullets in social media

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Sidney Toler as Charlie Chan

Man who utilize magic bullet often shoot self in foot

My apologies to Charlie Chan creator and writer, Earl Derr Biggers .  I am working my way through the long series of well-done, and timeless  mysteries on Netflix, and Charlie may have said that in one of them.

With all the social media experts, gurus, evangalists and visionaries out there, it stands to reason that everone else wants to be one too.  The experts are in my Facebook news stream offering webinars and e-books on how to get rich quick through Social Media.  Most of  my new followers on Twitter tout their get rich through Twitter schemes and expect me to follow them back, along with their 35,000 other followers. There seem to be plenty of folks out there willing to prey on our fatal attraction to  SOMETHING FOR NOTHING (or for a low, low one-day-only special value price + shipping and handling)

There is no magic bullet for putting social media to work for you, whether in your business or in your personal interactions.  It’s funny- the the interruption marketers are so attracted to  media that is SO permission marketing oriented.  It’s all in the numbers, I guess:  annoy 10,000 to get one sale, and so the spam juggernaut rolls on.  We are a people much more concerned with Result, rather than  Process.  And that is how social media is changing our values.  It’s all about the process.

Here is a 9 word magic bullet for business success with social media.  [Actually 3, 3 word phrases] And it’s absolutely free:

Participation is Marketing – Geoff Livingston
Markets are Conversations – Cluetrain
You Engaging Others (YEO) – Jeff Turner

The idea for this post came from a post by Matt Stigliano, on the Agent Genius Blog, and the comment exchange that followed.

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Newspapers and magazines a little thinner these days

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Noticed how the local newspaper looks a little thinner lately? It is especially obvious to me in Sunday Real Estate supplement. It’s not just the current economic situation that is causing the decreased amount of print advertising, it is marketers changing their tactics in favor of online media. I have posted before on permission marketing vs. interruption marketing, and the trends indicated in the chart courtersy of Marketing Sherpa, support a more permission based approach as we see a significant reduction of traditional interruption techniques: direct mail, radio/tv, spam email, and print advertising.

Some elements of online marketing are also projecting reduced use: paid ads on search engines and online display ads. Funny, though, that I get calls almost every day from SEO scammers and online ad sales folks. These folks work from the knowledge that many businesses and real estate agents stopped evolving with technology when they built their website a few years back.
The chart shows mixed results in Web 2.0 activities. Is the 20% reduction portion due to lack of being able to integrate social media marketing to the core business, lack of knowledge of business uses of social media, or denial that social media will ever have valid marketing uses? The 48% -adding, is still very positive, and I believe we will see an acceleration of social media marketing, as traditional advertising prices continue to provide less and less ROI.

H/T to The Real Estate Bloggers

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