Published:2014
Social Media Explained is a book written by Mark W. Schaefer who is best selling author of The Tao and Return On Influence where he talks about psychological and sociological factors that make social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter tick. He makes us understand the five foundational strategies of social media marketing and what holds the organizations from gaining success. I love how Mark starts this book. Fictional books are generally difficult to finish unless the author grabs our attention. That’s exactly how Mark has started this book, by grabbing attention. He talks to us through the introduction of the book asking 90 minutes of our time, telling us that he’ll help us understand social media and to keep the phone, laptop aside. Social MedianExplained is divided into four short sections. The first section covers the foundational concepts of how social media everywhere works. Section two covers the five most common questions that are usually asked by your boss. The third part covers a case study that illustrates how the concepts work. And the last part covers a clear view of some important social media platforms. In the first chapter, he talks about the era post-social media where a business would work with the help of print, television, radio until the social media era came into existence. He talks about how the entry of Facebook changed the business world. In the second chapter, he talks about the theory of small interactions and how these small interactions bring us together as people and bring us together as loyal customers. Small, consistent, meaningful interactions would lead to consumer loyalty. In the third chapter, he talks about the three essential elements of the social media mindset which are the Targeted connections, meaningful content and authentic helpfulness. He also makes us understand the importance of giving away to grow. The fourth chapter is about the benefits of the present one can have with the help of social media. In the fifth chapter, Mark talks about content. He dedicated an entire chapter to content because if social media were a living organism, content would be the air that breathes. He gave us three ways to maintain content mindshare.
1. Maintain mindshare through increasingly spectacular content.
2. Maintain mindshare with less pipeline.
3. Infiltrate other content with your message.
In the sixth chapter, he gave us reasons as to why we must measure the results of our corporate social media activities. He says that when some benefits are qualitative and some are quantitative and that’s when we require measurement. But also if we are only focused on quantitative measures like ROI we will miss the boat on many important benefits. He has examples of simple metrics that can indicate rising activity levels and the benefits of these metrics. In the seventh chapter, he talks about the other benefits that can be gained like PR, word of mouth advocacy, cost savings, customer service, HR and recruiting, internal process improvement, reputation management, and research and development. A report from McKinsey Global Institution identified 10 ways in which social technologies can create savings across the value chain. He gave us five reasons to have a social media presence:
1. Search
2. Facebook is the internet
3. Social proof
4. The trade show dilemma
5. Social media is the future of communications.
In the eighth chapter, he talks about how much one should spend on social media marketing. In the ninth chapter he talks about public criticism, his advice is to just forget about them. In chapter ten he gives us knowledge on how a company should start and answers the basic dilemma every company faces. In chapter eleventh the social sales strategy, tactics and results are explained. And finally, in section three he explains the different primers like blogs, podcasting, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, YouTube, SlideShare, and Photo sites.
Here We Go Again 