Thursday, January 12, 2012

Marketing to the Social Web - Book Review

Marketing to the Social Web - Book Review

Larry Weber captures several important themes in his 2007 book "Marketing to the Social Web". If the modern reader looks past some of the antiquated (in web time) companies and abstracts the essential ideas, this book still provides excellent insight into best practices for Understanding the Landscape of he Social Web (Chapters 1-4), Building Your Own Customer Community (Chapters 5-11) and Making Use of the four Online Conduit Strategies (Chapters 12-16). This is a professional discussion for large businesses. 

Chapter 13 and Chapter 16 cover the "conduits" of Blogging and Social Networks.  Five years after the the book was published it is clear that Weber was ahead of the curve with his recognition of these two conduits. After all, much of this work cites developments at MySpace and Friendster.

For those willing to ignore the references, the core ideas are as sound today as they were in 2007. For those willing to translate, the lessons of the early failures are readily reflected in the successes of Facebook and Google+ and might be leveraged into new solutions. Weber's rules for Employees that blog (pages 177,178) is ground-zero for most company compliance guidelines. 

Best observation: "Brand is a Conversation"

Bottom Line:

Probably not worth the full cover price, due to age, but a used copy or a library copy makes for simulating reading. 

~Tot1