Rather than a theoretical book, the step-by-step guide tells you exactly how to create a LinkedIn profile and make the most of it. What’s unusual about this book, too, is that it is part of a series from QuePublishing that includes free video tutorials and audio and web links as well.  If you learn best by printed instructions, you can just use the textbook. If you learn best by watching someone else, however, you can take advantage of the “show me” videos that are mentioned throughout the book and visit the link. 

The books produced by Que Publishing are about as close to real-time in book form that you can get.  One of the challenges in social media applications is that the information keeps changing, so the traditional book process can often take so long that the information is dated once the book is released.  Que Publishing, however, has set up a system to get this information to print very quickly, and author Patrice-Anne Rutledge www.patricerutledge.com has efficiently covered just about everything in this text, from the different levels of membership, mobile applications and ads to groups, tools and how to create good recommendations.   The table of contents is very detailed, so if you just have a specific aspect you want to learn about, such as creating LinkedIn e-mail signatures or adding the WordPress or Slideshare application, you can zero in right on that section.   I’ve been on LinkedIn since 2003 or 2004 (thanks to Ed Nusbaum!), and I found it handy to have one book to go to for certain aspects of the tool I hadn’t gotten to yet (the old 80/20 rule). 

She told me that her goal in writing Using LinkedIn “was to help people move beyond the basic profile and really take advantage of everything LinkedIn has to offer. So many people only scratch the surface when it comes to using all of LinkedIn’s features and then wonder why the site isn’t working for them.”  She has used the tool since January 2005 and has found that it generates better results for her consulting business than either Facebook or twitter.

It’s available on Amazon for $24.99.

I’ve found there are 3 types of social media books – the high level, extremely theoretical (which has its value), the ones whose covers promise a lot but turn out to be mostly platitudes and not much practical advice, and a 3rd category that covers the topic comprehensively with a theoretical point of view and a detailed roadmap point of view.

Anyone writing a book on social media will have a tough time in their book proposal explaining how their book on strategy could possibly be different from Liana Evans’ new book, “Social Media Marketing,” or how it would advance the knowledge available on the topic.  She has really created a thorough piece of work, and it’s also the first book I’ve seen that includes a critical section on the importance of involving your legal team from the very beginning.    As I’ve blogged before, the legal dept. can be an unwitting roadblock to your communication efforts unless you partner with them.

I think Li explains best in her introduction what the goal of the book is about:  “I’ve written this book to give any marketer, novice, or expert a deeper look into the realm of social media marketing. So much has been touted, preached, and hoisted up on a pedestal as things marketers or companies should be doing, it’s hard to believe what’s true and what isn’t. This book can be your guide from beginning to end in understanding what’s hype and what’s not. For making the case of whether or not you should be actively engaging in social media, to putting the pieces together to plan a successful social media marketing strategy.”

It’s a helpful book in determining whether a particular client of yours should implement social media as part of their marketing strategy, as well as a guide to how you should roll it out. It’s a very strategic book, but it includes the tactical how-to and background information as well.

One of her mantras is knowing your audience and doing research on the demographic, and finding out where your audience is. I’m working with a client now to convince them that the upfront research is critical. Their default opinion is just to use social media and press releases as broadcast tools, without really knowing whether their targeted customers are on a particular social network. I will be using Li’s book as validation of my instincts and as printed reference to build my case (if it’s in print, it must be true – or at least, it carries a lot of clout!  tongue-in-cheek). 

She spends a good deal of time explaining why it’s a mistake to think you can avoid negative things by staying out of social media. We all know we need to be aware of the conversations so we can address them, and Li explains it very articulately. When you come to the community, too, she says, be prepared to add value. Community members want a conversation about the brands they love, not to listen to the same messages they get in brochures and TV.  Social communities are a niche, and people choose to be there. Therefore, your approach must be unique to that community – this is exactly what I tell my clients. Just because a customer knows your history does not mean they know your brand.  Lots of good quotable assertions are in this book.

As I write this, I’m looking at “Guerilla Marketing Excellence” on my bookshelf in my office. Written by Jay Conrad Levinson, it was one of THE books about marketing in the 90s. Times have changed. While I’m sure it contains a lot of advice that is still germane,  if you want to be relevant today, you and your clients need to understand a practical roadmap to how social media should be integrated with your marketing.

I think I also liked the book also because she was one of the few people who agrees with me about Seth Godin.    (see p. 243!).   As you probably know, he does not allow comments on his blog, thus she doesn’t feel it’s a true conversation. He is just broadcasting information which too many people seem to scoop up, turn around and offer their own followers.     (The last is my take, not her phrasing).  I don’t want to slam him (I’m sure he’d be great to have coffee with) and I know he has explained on his site why he doesn’t take comments, but still….the one-way dialogue hits me the wrong way…

The only pushback I have on the author are the occasional references – not very complimentary – to PR agencies.   To wit, “On a general level, most marketing firms or PR agencies tend to look at social media sites as marketing tactics instead of parts of an entire social media strategy… they think it’s about pushing out another press release, commercial on YouTube, or free coupon to try your product.”  Another — ” If you’re working with classic public relations firms, their idea of social media might be e-mailing your press release to a bunch of bloggers or journalists with the hope that someone will care.”   Li, Li, come back to us!   Come to Phoenix!   We have a pretty good group here of enlightened agencies.

Thanks to Que Publishing’s publicity team for bringing this book to my attention.  From time to time I receive pitches from book publicity agents, and I was dubious about this one because it seemed like a broad topic that had already been done to death.  I was wrong!

He admits that the methodology is not completely accurate, because it only looks at occurrences of terms such as ”unhappy” or “happy” - and it can’t really interpret them in context. So a phrase like “I am not happy” would be incorrectly interpreted as “happy.” 

Twitter, therefore, is an unexpected research tool into people’s attitudes, so that implies some possibilities for PR people to discern quickly what the general opinion of an issue is, as they prepare their research for issues or product launches.

If you think you know what makes you happy, think again, and read Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. The big take away is that when people make predictions about their reactions to future events, “they tend to neglect the fact that their brains have performed the filling in trick as an integral part of the active imagination.” He gives the example of being invited to attend a party.  Even though you don’t want to attend with your spouse, you go, and surprisingly, end up having a wonderful time.

“Why? Because the party involved cheap beer and hula hoops, rather than classical music and seaweed crackers. It was precisely our style, and we liked what we predicted we’d hate because our prediction was based on a detailed image that reflected our brain’s best guess, which was in this case, dead wrong. The point here is that when we imagine the future, we often do so in the blind spot of our mind’s eye, and this tendency can cause us to misimagine the future events whose emotional consequences we are attempting to weigh.”

The book was a game changer for me. Keep this research in mind next time you are trying to predict a future action or event and whether or not it will make you happy — no matter how intuitive you are, you could be dead wrong.

If you’re looking for a book that has enough data for the nonbelievers as well as significant how-to chapters on setting up campaigns, this is it.  Facebook now is primarily used by the 35-55 age group, and is growing exponentially faster than LinkedIn.    “If you don’t want to fish in a pond that is packed with approximately 800,000 new fish every single day,” says the author, “then have fun somewhere else.”  The days of forcing customers to go to a website of your choosing are gone. You have to go to where your fans are.

After throwing enough stats in the first few chapters to convince even the most stalwart Luddite, Levy explains how to establish a corporate presence on Facebook, the power and reach of Facebook Connect, how and when to set up Facebook advertising and take advantage of its 11 different audience filters, the value of Facebook apps, privacy concerns, marketing strategies, how to develop communities, and best in class examples.

It’s hard to argue with the logic of the book, and you can use the arguments to bolster your explanations to management as well as to fine tune the campaigns you develop for your clients. 

One of the first concerns about social media mentioned by reluctant users is over perceived privacy issues, and Levy quotes Dawn Foster’s comment that “people confuse ‘personal’ with ‘private’” – big difference.  You can be personal – read ‘personable’ – on Facebook, without exposing your privacy barriers. 

There are three goals when developing a Facebook marketing strategy:

• Community building –  if your goal is to develop a strong overall presence on Facebook
• Marketing and promotion – if your goal is to drive traffic to landing pages or event registration or to promote awareness around a product launch or special offer
• Advertising – although the most limited strategy of the three, this is helpful if your goal is to use Facebook only as another advertising stream for your company product or service.

Levy doesn’t leave out measurement and web analytics, either, or the sweat equity costs that go into the time spent to built a community.

Even if you consider yourself a Facebook expert, there are some good tips to keep in mind (or to refresh your memory) as you develop your clients’ strategies. Best of all, there are excellent “best in class” case studies in the 10th chapter that cover a good sampling of celebrities, products and services, ranging from how Volkswagen and Microsoft Office use Facebook campaigns to the tricks and tips used by Mashable, the Jonas Brothers, and Gary Vaynerchuk.  Levy also points out that instead of creating community around your product or service, you can choose to create it around the industry your product provides for. 

Some other gems from the book to use with your recalcitrant client:

• With Facebook, humans can showcase the individual personalities that help them to make them who they are
• As Chris Brogan says, it helps companies “grow bigger ears”
• It’s not eating up your time as much as it is making an investment in your future
• The blending of personal and professional helps develop a strong community
• Facebook is now the top driver of traffic, over Google, to large sites
• There is still a lot of value in corporate websites, but nowadays, you have to go where your prospects, customers, and fans hang out and build communities with them there. This in turn can direct customers toward visiting your corporate website and engaging with you on your turf.
• Facebook helps humanize your brand
• People use Facebook as part of their online reputation management and personal/professional branding strategy
• For the nonbelievers who are reading the book, this is your call to action. Enough is enough. It’s time to accept that social networks aren’t going anywhere. 

Justin Levy is director of business development, marketing, and client relations at New Marketing Labs, a new media marketing agency based outside Boston. He’s also partner and general manager of Caminito Argentinean Steakhouse, which eats its own (steak)food and has successfully used social media to drive sales and build communities.   The book is published by Pearson Education and you can learn more at www.justinrlevy.com

It’s a flexible, non-linear approach to solving issues in the workplace.  The process gets you to think, rather than follow a prescribed formula to conflicts, and that is the power of the concept. One of the key themes that Katz emphasizes in the book is that you should not go into conflict resolution with a pre-determined idea of what the other person will say, but rather with an idea of what your game plan should be and what is personally negotiable and non-negotiable.

This is a powerful way of approaching conflicts, because you focus on a different area than on trying to prepare for a debate or trying to anticipate their reaction. In order to understand one’s personal style, Katz includes a simple questionnaire that helps categorize people into one of five different styles:  attacking, confronting, problem solving, compromising, and withdrawing.

If you already have self-knowledge, you might not need to read the book. But how many of us truly understand how to approach various work conflicts? The author describes several examples of how her clients faced common problems at work, and how they use the Working Circle to analyze and solve the problem successfully, keeping in mind that success might not mean we get the result we are hoping for, but we still gain valuable insights and experience.

As Katz notes, breaking down a complex and disturbing problem often gives one a feeling of empowerment.   Part of the process is looking to your past to find examples of where you have encountered similar issues and how you dealt with them.  Have you encountered a bully before?   Have you been caught in the middle of fights and disagreements?  

The Working Circle is designed to take into account what are called the masculine and feminine approaches to conflict resolution. Rather than being gender specific, which Diane is careful to note in almost every chapter of the book,  these are just general terms to describe aggressive and avoidance approaches to conflict. The optimal solution is more collaborative.

Of special interest to PR professionals, Chapter 6 deals with ethics and conflict:  “What happens when you have to defend your organization to an outsider, all the while knowing that what your company did was not right?”  

The bottom line is that solving conflicts often takes a certain amount of courage, and the payoff is significant to personal satisfaction.    The goal of the process is to transform the individuals involved. The message of the book is don’t be intimidated by anyone or any situation. 

The Working Circle process can be applied to personal conflicts in our lives as well, and I suspect that the author’s next book will be “Win at Home!” 

Diane Katz  lives in Tucson and has a master’s degree in organizational psychology, and a PhD in conflict resolution. Win at Work! is published by Wiley and available in bookstores nationwide.  For more information, visit www.TheWorkingCircle.com.

Thanks to PR firm O’Connor Communications for bringing this book to my attention.

Even though I have been blogging for Valley PR Blog for 2 years, I found this book helpful and more practical than some other blogging books I’ve read.    There are plenty of factoids in the book to persuade even the most reluctant blogger, such as the news that online media is the only area of media currently growing.   Blogging helps people communicate with large numbers of people quickly and publicly.  Blogs have grown from 5 million in 2005 to 133 million in 2008.  If one of your competitors is continually blogging about your industry and you aren’t, search engines will find your competitor’s blog and place it, not yours, high on the list of search results when someone searches for one or more terms in your industry.  By learning how to engage the public through open online channels, you can truly connect with your customers.   A business blog not only gets the messaging out to customers, but enables you to bring your audience’s comments in, making your blog the home base for these online conversations.   [This is the benefit of blogging that I think many business executives fail to understand - the ability to centralize where the conversations about your company are taking place].

There are 9 chapters which cover everything from why blogging is important to how to get more readers (77% of bloggers attract readers by commenting on other blogs, according to Technorati), how to choose your particular blogging platform, how to engage with your readers, what to write about, how to deal with negative feedback, multimedia blogging, and creative commons licensing.   The case studies are helpful and not too long – just quick bites of information to help support the text.  There is also an appendix of important blogging sites.  

If you are looking for more tips on urls, tagging, keywords, YouTube channels, photo-sharing services, polls, contests, and other blogging components, you’ll find it in this guide.

The authors are Eric Butow and Rebecca Bollwitt.   Eric is CEO of Butow Communications Group, a web design and online marketing firm in Jackson, California.   He has written several computing books, including “How to Succeed in Business Using LinkedIn.”   Rebecca is the co-founder of sixty4media, which specializes in WordPress design and development as well as social media consulting in Vancouver, BC.   She has been blogging since 2004 on miss604.com, and in 2008 was listed within the top 10 “Most Influential in Canadian Social Media.”

Note:   From time to time I’m offered complimentary review books from Pearson/Que/Sams.  If I like the book concept, I’ll review it. 

• Nearly 260 million people use the Web on a regular basis in the U.S. alone – so the Internet has become a mainstream social activity.
• As your potential customer makes a purchasing decision, he’s influenced by various circles of people through the conversations that he has with them online.
• Social influence plays a bigger role in “high consideration purchases” (such as car buying) than low consideration purchases (such as which toothpaste to buy).
• More and more customers are going online seeking advice and guidance to make product purchasing decisions. They would rather go online than look at a flyer that arrived in the mail.

Singh calls it SIM, social influence marketing, and among the “Ten SIM Best Practices” are:

1) Open up your brand to your consumers, and let them evolve it

2) Respond to everything, even if it means you’re up all night

3) Focus not just on social media but on social influencers

4) Structure your marketing department for this social world

5) Conduct many small tests frequently and build on each one

The book describes the various types of social media influencers there are, how to research them, and very important, how to measure the effectiveness of different types of social influence marketing.   Most of us are beyond the “what is social media” stage and want practical advice about how to apply it in marketing successfully.   If you also want good advice and direction on which research tools to use, this is the book.   At the end, he lists the 10 SIM-related “must-read” blogs.

Note:  from time to time, publicity agents for publishing houses offer to send me books to review.   If I like the book topic, I’ll read it and blog about it as an uncompensated reader.   

Here’s a list of my top favorites – are any of yours among them?

 Good Textbooks/Primers on PR:

Public Relations Strategies and Tactics – Wilcox et. al.

Business Issues

Business:  Its Legal, Ethical and Global Environment – Marianne Jennings

References

The Associated Press Stylebook

Measuring Public Relationships – Katie Delahaye Paine

Best Practices

The Trusted Advisor – David H. Maister, et. al.

New Rules

World Wide Rave – David Meerman Scott

Putting the Public Back in Public Relations – Brian Solis and Deirdre Breakenridge

Grammar

Punctuate it Right! – Harry Shaw

Antiquated Amusement:

Publicity: How to Plan, Produce and Place It – Herbert M. Baus [1942]

“Any pretty girl has access to an editor’s desk, because he is a male with a combination of gallantry and a prospecting eye…….Even though she may not be good at many aspects of publicity, a woman can always get a hearing.” 

Thanks to Kristen Ward for the idea.

What I like best about “All a Twitter” by Tee Morris is his conversational style. He’s not trying to be a lofty author, speaking from on high.   He’s just sharing what he has learned since he first started tweeting in spring 2007.  He covers a lot of ground, and in fact the book is 280 pages long, and includes a section that explains tools for twitter as well as twitter speak.

He tells you how to register, starting with the basics. He tells you how to pick a good photo. There is a significant section on how to get tweets on your mobile phone. The book addresses all levels of experience on twitter, and goes into both personal and professional uses. If you have friends who wonder about twitter search, hash tags, tweet stats, tweet ups, Mr. Tweet, this is a great overview for them.

He also gives his personal perspective on aspects of twitter. For instance, like me, he hates automated tweets. I don’t follow people who “schedule” repeat tweets every few hours.  He strongly feels that tweeting quotes isn’t participation (this is where I don’t agree – I follow a couple of people on twitter who post cool quotes each day, and I find them inspiring).   He hates tweetshrink, a tool I hadn’t heard about but which scans and condenses your tweet. The result often looks like hieroglyphics.   He points out that twitter “isn’t group therapy,” where you try to work out some of your personal problems online. He also notes that what you say openly can backfire, and cautions people to think twice before they hit that tweet send.

My favorite section is in chapter 9, “The Outsider’s Perspective.” 

Returning to what I mentioned earlier in this chapter about explaining twitter to someone outside of the community, you remember those strange looks? Sometimes you get those from people who tried twitter and just don’t “get it.” That doesn’t mean they’re missing out or not as sharp as you. It just means that… they don’t get it. If you try to make them get it, that makes a bad situation only worse.

He’s right. Either people are motivated to find out what all the fuss is about, or they’re not. Not my problem. But if you have friends who are sitting on the fence and want to learn more, and just need a little prodding, or if you want to learn a little bit more about twitter than you currently know, this is a very readable book.

And kudos to the publishing company’s publicist, Lisa Jacobson Brown.  She sent me a really nice pitch letter/heads up about the book, and it was a rare pleasure to receive such a targeted e-mail.

The book is $19.99 and published by Que Publishing.  You can find the author at www.teemorris.com and @TeeMonster on twitter.

p.s. Warning – Tee says he gets asked all the time if the book is written in more than 140 characters.  He addresses it in the introduction: “I’ve heard the joke. I’ve heard it often. The fact that this book is as thick as it is and has 13 chapters should be the hint that there is a bit more to twitter than you might expect. Please don’t make that joke. It’s just not working for me anymore.”

Brian owns FutureWorks, a PR and new media agency in Silicon Valley.   Deirdre is president and director of communications at PFS Marketwyse and an adjunct professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University. 

The book really answers two questions — What’s wrong with (traditional) PR? and, How can we make PR more effective in these rapidly changing times?  It’s a revealing analysis of what has happened in public relations over the last ten years, with practical advice about how to avoid becoming a PR dinosaur.

It’s hard to summarize all the points raised in the book, but here are some highlights I underscored as I read through it.   Seriously, if you have an executive/client who is still in the Stone Age, buy the this book as a gift and point them especially to chapter one, which has a section specifically addressed to “Company Executives,” and chapter seven, “Blogger relations.”  Maybe they’ll believe a published book if they don’t take your word for it.

• Social media will help us put the public back into public relations.
• It’s a chance to reintroduce sociology, anthropology, psychology and other sciences to inspire a new, more meaningful kind of public relations
• PR 2.0 is the realization that PR now has an opportunity not only to work with traditional journalists, but engage directly with a new set of influencers as well. It’s a chance to improve our craft.
• Yesterday’s techniques – mass, meaningless, one-way communication – no longer works (Yikes! Even my master’s degree, which is in “mass communications,” is outdated now!)
• The writing style has changed to more conversational, contrary to the standard AP style of writing.
• A blog is a conversation with readers, and you don’t have to start a conversation knowing all the facts.
• It’s the difference between pitching an audience versus participating with the people who matter to your story
• Today, people are in control as they drive their own communications
• Why change?  Journalists are creating blacklists and publishing the names of PR people who refuse to change their ways (Show them Chris Anderson’s blacklist post from Oct 2007 here).
• The benefit of shifting from pitching to conversations includes cultivating relationships, strengthening customer service, increasing brand resonance and loyalty, which all contributes to the company’s bottom line.
• You need to take the initial steps, even if you don’t get it completely right the first time. We are all still learning.
• The next frontier will be online video, which will help tell your stories to people who enjoy visual media.
• The primary focus for bloggers is not selling, but to create the content that defines their brand. Instead of using the corporate blog as an arm of marketing, identify customer pain points and deliver the painkiller in a direct, personable and believable fashion.
• it’s a challenge to keep up, but you must. Identify the online communities where your constituents are congregating, and remember you’re not reaching individuals, not audiences.
• Hope is not lost for the older generations (Glad to see we’re not written off completely!). These groups just have extra work to do to catch up, perhaps even a complete overhaul about how they currently do things. The fittest and most willing and able to adapt will be the survivors, and not every current PR professional will survive the transition.
• Social networks and the people within them are unforgiving in their tolerance of sales or marketing pitches. You need to humanize your story in the process of storytelling.
• With every new channel that gains momentum, you have an opportunity to build a connection between you, your peers and your customers.
• The old communications model was: Who says what, in which channel, to whom, to what effect.  The new model is: Who says what, in which channel, to whom, to what effect, then who hears what, who shares what, with what intent, to what effect.
• The new influencers are people just like you and me. Social media is not a spectator sport.
• Social media helps you gather real-world intelligence that you can feed back into your organization to improve the existing service, product, and management infrastructure. This in turn helps companies be more competitive.
• Change is never easy, but you must engage or die. We don’t have the luxury of time, as the people in Web communities don’t stop sharing information. Customers are seeking solutions, insight and answers right now.
• Finding the right influencers takes time. However, most executives are much too impatient to sit and wait for an organic campaign to gain traction. These executives will have to learn that when people choose to make a campaign viral, it’s worth the wait.
• The whole process starts with you and the new mindset.

If your client hasn’t listened to your counsel so far, this book just might be the leverage to help them finally see it. Brian and Deirdre build a strong case about why the traditional PR strategies and techniques have to change and adapt.