Customer Reviews

How to Build Buzz for Your Biz: Tap Into the Power of Social Media, Publicity, and Relationship Marketing to Grow Your Business

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"Advertising may be dying, but marketing is very much alive and thriving via social media, publicity and relationship-building. Tap into the power of these tools and you'll soon see the results!" ~ pg. 13

If you are a business owner and you have been considering getting more involved in social media then Wendy Kenney has some valuable tips to share. "How to Build Buzz For Your Biz" is a practical yet exciting guide. It will show you how to get thousands of visitors to your website by understanding the most effective ways to increase business through utilizing social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. This book will especially be appreciated by business owners who are tired of ineffective advertising strategies. I can recommend this to anyone who wants to become more familiar with online options that will bring in more loyal customers and keep them hooked on a product or service.

~The Rebecca Review

Wendy has provided useful easy to understand information AND provided step by step instructions as well. Throughout the book she gives the reader the background to grasp the concepts and then gives the tools to go out and "do it." This is a great book to get the most use out of your marketing dollars. Not only will it help readers grow their business, it will help them build credibility in the community, a must for long term survival.

The book starts out with building a marketing plan and what kinds of mistakes to avoid. The second part of the book covers how to use Social Media effectively. She also covers gaining and using publicity as well as how to build relationships with customers. All great info that can and should be used.

The Worthy Winner of the Global EBook Award 2011 Business Non-Fiction Category

This is a basic marketing book for small businesses that extends classic theory into new media. It starts with a rapid assessment of who is the target customer, what they really want and how to add value to every transaction. The book then examines how to find your target customers and reach them with a compelling offer.

The book is written from a depth of personal experience gained the hard way; the author gave up her `day job' to build her own business. It includes some of the strategies that she has used to build `buzz' for many businesses, describes the biggest

marketing mistake that most businesses make, and how to avoid it. It also explains how the author got 9,000 visitors to her website in just one day; and exactly where to go and which marketing strategies she has used to find new customers.

Best of all; the book is full of short practical sections, with space for the reader to make their own annotations, and is written for a business owner with little spare cash. Each chapter ends with a usefull list of website where readers can get additional information on the topics covered or can start to do some of their `buzz-building' online. There are a few awkward pieces such as the exhortation to fold down a corner of the page when I was reading the book (which is also available as a paperback) in pdf format. Reading the pdf on my Kindle solved that one for me but it illustrates some of the dangers of rushing in to the new media without a thorough review.

The real heart of the book is the social marketing using interactive technologies. It starts, traditionally enough with a discussion of the different generations and their likely preferences when interfacing with the web.

The book assumes no familiarity with new media and explains that social media comes in many different forms including social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook or MySpace; online forums such as Meetup; micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter or Google Buzz; social newsrooms such as Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon or Yahoo! Buzz; and photo sharing sites such as Flickr or Picasa; as well as online video sharing sites, including YouTube and Vimeo; blogs, dynamic websites, optimized press releases and case studies, e-books, online magazines, white papers, Internet radio shows, Internet television shows and podcasts. It provides a simple introduction to the main sites and some clear `dos and don'ts' to guide the reader in getting started.

The book also covers myriad ideas for using traditional approaches better. Networking, industry association membership, public speaking, sponsorships, etc. are all included; they are dealt with in a practical and no-fuss manner that invites attention and action. This is a book that will keep you seriously busy, give you many good new experiences and help you to build a platform for your business.

Although the book is written for small businesses it will also suit the sales, business-development, marketing and PR specialists in larger corporates. As a board member I found it refreshing and definitely a book that I wanted to pass on to staff. As a reviewer I found it well worth reading, practical and action oriented. As a friend, I highly recommend it. As a judge, I agreed with my co-judges that it deserved to be nominated, among the finalists and awarded the global ebook award for business non-fiction.

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Julie Garland McLellan is a Judge in the Business Category of the Global EBook Awards and is a Professional Company Director and Board Advisor. She is the author of Presenting to Boards Presenting to Boards: Practical Skills for Corporate Presentations (Volume 1) and Dilemmas, Dilemmas Dilemmas, Dilemmas: Practical Case Studies for Company Directors

I got the opportunity to read and review How to Build Buzz for Your Biz: Tap Into the Power of Social Media, Publicity, and Relationship Marketing to Grow Your Business by Wendy Kenney this weekend, and it's a very good handbook for small business marketing. The reason I say "small business" is that most of these techniques cost little or nothing to utilize, and the returns can be quite high. Businesses of any size could (and should) be doing these things, but generally it's the small operator with little excess cash flow who is struggling to be heard in the market, and that's where the book focuses.

Contents:

Section 1 - Back to the Basics - Building Your Business Marketing Plan: Who's Your Ideal Customer?; Give 'Em What They Want, When They Want It; Girls (and Boys) Just Wanna Have Fun - Adding Value to the Experience; How to Reach Your Ideal Customers Now That You Know What They Want; Getting Customers Is Easy with Your Marketing GPS; The Big Marketing Mistake Business Owners Make and How to Avoid It

Section 2 - Social Media Marketing: How to Use Social Media to Build Buzz for Your Business; Knowing Where to Begin; Your Social Media Marketing Strategy; How to Use Twitter Effectively; How to Use Facebook Effectively; Your Website, the Doorway to Success; Blogs - From Yellow Pages Ads to Diaries; Get Listed and Get Results!; How to Get 9,000 Visitors on Your Website or Blog in Just One Day; Video Marketing - What's the Big Deal?

Section 3 - Publicity: 15 Ways to Generate Successful Publicity; Put Your Knowledge in a Book; Hold a Contest; Celebrate a Special Holiday or Create Your Own; How to Write a Press Release That Works; Sponsor a Good Cause; Give Away Free Samples

Section 4 - Relationship Marketing: It's Who You Know; The One Marketing Tool That Explodes Your Profits - Guaranteed!; How to Profit from Association Memberships

Section 5 - Where We're Headed: Mobile Marketing - the Future of Marketing Is Here

Appendix A - Twitter Resources; Appendix B - Monitoring Resources; Appendix C - Blogging Platforms; Appendix D - Directories; Appendix E - Press Release Websites

About the Author - Wendy Kenney

Kenney packs a lot of information in a relatively few number of pages. I've read entire books devoted to just one of the topics listed above. There are pros and cons to that. The good thing is that for someone who is just getting started on something like Twitter or Facebook, you won't get bogged down in the minutiae. On the other hand, there are a number of nuances to these tools that can't be covered in just a few pages, and thus you risk making some mistakes along the way. But I'd contend it's generally better to get started and make a few mistakes, rather than do nothing for fear of not being perfect.

If you already have a background in social media tools like blogs and Twitter, you will probably know most of the information in section 2. But even though I fall firmly into that category, there were still a couple of ideas I gleaned from the material. I would also venture to guess that there are plenty of other things to learn in the other sections (I know I certainly did). With Kenney's upbeat and positive style, the chapters are easy to absorb and apply to your own situations.

Bottom line, How to Build Buzz for Your Biz is a good choice for getting started on a cohesive marketing approach for your small business. And even if you think you know all this already, you'll probably still pick up an idea or two that would more than pay for the cost of the book.

Disclosure:

Obtained From: Author

Payment: Free

There are like 704,577 marketing books out there. None have caught up with the realness of today's small business world like Wendy Kenney's 'Build Buzz' book. She not only includes the value of social media marketing, but shows ways to create microblogs and updates for social media sites in ways that won't affect the schedule of your business of your life.

However, the one aspect I really enjoy are Wendy's "personable" strategies versus strictly business-networking processes. After all, businesses do have human beings running them! She does a phenomenal job of story-telling, pulling simplicity out of seemingly complicated strategy (i.e. - making profitable business connections by joint a huge National organization of Somebodies) and emphasizing being a human being first!

One of my biggest deterrents is the idea of messing up professional relationships because I am so damn friendly with clients! I volunteer with their organizations, send thank you cards, talk with them informally via email and phone, and while I got the jobs done right, I was always nervous that I was getting too chummy. Wendy's book OK'd it, and gave guidance on the best tool in the marketing game: the phone! As she puts it, "the telephone is the most effective and low cost marketing tool we have, because it works!" I couldn't agree more. Putting a voice to a business owner's face always goes well!