Marketing & Branding ebooks

My e-books are now available for both Nook and Kindle.

How To Build and Manage Your Brand

For Nook

For Kindle







How to Brand and Market A Commodity

For Nook

For Kindle

Book review: The Book of Business Awesome/UnAwesome

This is an interesting book. Read either the `awesome' half or the `unawesome' side first and then flip the book upside down to read the other half. One half contains stories about brands getting social media right and the other half contains stories about brands really screwing up in their social media communication practices.

Each chapter is very short and reads as a mini-case study. All are anecdotal based on experiences of the author.

As a result, you will get an easy-to-read book that entertainingly covers best and worst practices in using social media as a business marketing tool.

In my mind the most important aspect of the book is the fact that the author reminds the reader that social media are just tools to communicate with audiences. These channels merely and only enable you to communicate with people. Social media channels can only highlight the corporate behavior in which you are already engaged. If you have lousy customer service then social media will just make it more obvious. If you ask for feedback from customers and state that you want to hear from them but then ignore or delete their feedback, it will reflect poorly on you and expose you as being disingenuous or thin-skinned.

The author is really talking about making sure your organization is aligned properly to treat customers the right way. He then shows how some companies are using social media to assist in those efforts. Some get it right, some get it wrong. Some misunderstand how social media works, others understand it and leverage its powers properly, and yet others simply behave terribly in the first place and social media can't fix those fundamental organizational problems. The social media tools, in-and-of themselves, will not change organizational behavior. My favorite sentence in the book is on p. 83 where the author states, "Social media does not make a company good or bad; it just amplifies what they already are."

Often the entire impression people have about your brand is a result of the one or two people who are responsible for posting your public social media messages so the book serves as a warning to make sure you think that through and create social media strategy and guidelines first before you just cut a couple people loose on your social media initiative. After all, those people can ultimately shape the entire impression people have of your brand.