Social Media Success!: Practical advice and real world examples for social media engagement using social networking tools like Linkedin, Twitter, Blogging and more [Paperback]

Janet Fouts (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 20, 2009 | ISBN-10: 1600051642 | ISBN-13: 978-1600051647

Social media can do amazing things. It can create an environment where your friends and followers and even your own customers become evangelists and act as a virtual sales, support and marketing teams. It can help you spread word of your business, your products and your successes through extended networks of people you've never even met. It can allow you to create lasting and deep relationships across continents, religious and political beliefs, in places you've always wanted to visit or never knew existed. It can open your eyes to the richness of human relationships and even find you a job.

Social media success is not about numbers. It's about conversations and relationships. It's about getting to know your customers, your friends and neighbors and yes, even your competitors! Build good strong relationships, have lots of conversations, and your social media efforts will be successful.

This book is a launch pad for successful social media engagement. It shows how to identify the right networks, find the influencers, the people you want to talk to and which tools will work the best for you. It gives you guidelines to building a successful strategy and explains how social media works to build your business, drive traffic to your website and enhance your customer service efficiency.

'Social Media Success!' will be your guide to getting started in many of the top networks and building a cohesive plan to be as efficient as possible with your valuable time and resources. Learn from real life cases of businesses large and small who have successfully used social media networks and strategies to grow their businesses, improve customer service, raise funds and even find employment using these tools.

Product Details

• Paperback: 162 pages
• Publisher: Happy About (October 20, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1600051642
• ISBN-13: 978-1600051647
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #580,439 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Janet is a prominent public speaker, trainer, author and social media coach with many years working hands-on in online marketing and community. "Social Media" may be a new term to many, but it's been a way of getting business done for her from the first start-up 13 years ago. Over her career she's worked with a variety of clients ranging from non-profits, dot com startups, restaurants, technology companies and wineries and it's that variety that keeps her on her toes and learning new things to share with her clients and her readers.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This one NAILS it!, October 27, 2009

By 

Michael Martine (Montpelier, VT United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Social Media Success!: Practical advice and real world examples for social media engagement using social networking tools like Linkedin, Twitter, Blogging and more (Paperback)

Time to come out from under your rock. This book is aimed squarely at business owners and people inside organizations who need to get up to speed and succeed. Janet has spend years in the trenches breaking it all down for beginners and making this seemingly overwhelming subject accessible to the point of mastery.

In Chapter 1, What is Social Media? You will get a great layman's definition of where these sweeping changes came from and what you need to know about them now in order to even discuss them intelligently. And in this first chapter you discover something very important: this is not some happy "feel good" book about social media as so many of them are. The author does not pull punches and tells it straight, and I for one really appreciated that. Disillusionment is a powerfully enervating force, but you get a straight deal in this book. Even in Chapter 1, she discusses social media backlash. Good stuff.

Chapter 2, Quelling the Naysayers, is super important for those who work in organizations where you know you have to "sell" social media to others and try to bring them on board. Making cogent and persuasive arguments for adopting a social media strategy may not exactly be your strength, but this chapter gives you the ammunition you need.

Chapter 3, Inbound Marketing vs Outbound, explains these two concepts very well. Understanding inbound marketing is key to online marketing success, because that's practically the only kind of marketing you can do online.

Chapter 4, It's Not About You, makes the important point of what kind of mindset and attitude to have in order to achieve social media success.

Chapter 5, Building Your Social Media Network, starts to get into the nuts and bolts of specific strategies and tactics that work. It also deals with a number people have been tossing around a lot, lately, called "Dunbar's Number." This is supposedly the limit of how many people you can know and remember.

Chapter 6, Finding Your Network, is about how to successfully connect with the right people in the vast space of social media and networks. In this chapter you'll learn about specific online and software tools you can use to target the correct topics in social media. This is something many people get wrong, and then they think social media itself is a waste of time. Nothing could be further from the truth; they just didn't know what they were doing.

Chapter 7, Choosing the Right Venues, gives you guidelines for deciding on sites and tools to use.

Chapter 8, Set Some Rules (Or at Least Some Guidelines) helps you craft your social media policies in a way that protect organizational interests while also creating maximum marketing benefit for the organization. This is another disaster area for most companies, but this info will steer you through it easily.

Chapters 9 - 15 Cover all the popular social media sites and general tools on the web and provides you with a winning game plan to tackle each one if it's right for your organization to use. Covered are Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, video, and blogging.

Chapter 16, Creating Your Social Network, dives into what kind of information should be in social media profiles, talks about social bookmarking sites specifically (a subset of social media), and also discusses automation.

If there's a downside to this book, it's that it doesn't make it obvious the book is aimed at business people in organizations, rather than single-person businesses or non-business people. That doesn't mean they won't benefit, but there's information in the book that wouldn't apply to them.

The work I do online is similar to what Janet does, and in fact I know Janet because we've worked together on several projects. That's how I know that what she's saying in this book is good material. As I read it, I thought to myself there was much in it I could not have said better myself. Am I "biased?" I have nothing to gain from a positive review of this book. The book is simply worth your time.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Social Media Guide We've Been Waiting For!, October 27, 2009

By 

Laura Schaub (San Jose, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Social Media Success!: Practical advice and real world examples for social media engagement using social networking tools like Linkedin, Twitter, Blogging and more (Paperback)

The Social Media jungle can be daunting for the newcomer; there are so many choices, each with their own particular flavor and set of rules, how do you begin? And more importantly, how do you SUCCEED? Traditional marketing and sales methods don't work the same in this world, and one has merely to look at the many people using Social Media unskillfully to see that. This is web 2.0 people, the new math!

Anyone venturing into uncharted waters benefits from a teacher, a guide who has been through it and can show you the way. Janet Fouts is an experienced Social Media coach who can help you make sense of how Social Media is changing the business landscape, and also how you can find your place in it. I highly recommend this book to anyone seeking to understand these new communication tools and how people and businesses are using them now, with great success.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Proof Positive, October 27, 2009

By 

Allan (United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Social Media Success!: Practical advice and real world examples for social media engagement using social networking tools like Linkedin, Twitter, Blogging and more (Paperback)

Ever since LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and the rest crossed into the mainstream, my clients have been asking "Does social media really work for business?" Thanks to Janet Fouts, who has been practicing it professionally and well for more than a decade, I now have proof positive. Her book contains "practical advice and real world examples for social media engagement." SOCIAL MEDIA SUCCESS is must-reading for everyone working - or playing - online today.