The New Influencers – A marketer’s guide to social media by Paul Gillin
If you are new to social media then this is a good place to start. Gillin starts with the basics of web2.0 and does a really good job explaining some of the more basic concepts. This includes how it can be used for marketing by both large and small companies, key insights into blogging and the leading bloggers, “tools of the trade” (podcasts, vodcasts, rss, tagging, etc), and how to “go viral”.
One the downside, Gillin doesn’t arrive at too many major insights in this book. He profiles some key players in the marketing 2.0 world and you can pull some insights out of their stories, but Gillin doesn’t really take this initiative himself.
Some of the best stuff taken from this book:
Transparency might be the biggest shift companies face as they engage with social media.
Customer relationships are changing. HackingNetFlix.com is a great example of this. A NetFlix fan started this blog about the company and it shortly had a huge following. Gillin explains how NetFlix was at first weary of this, but soon embraced the fact that they had such a fan who was sharing his passion with tens of thousands. This kind of a relationship with customers is getting to be increasingly important. It again has to do with the idea of transparency and how a company’s product must stand up to consumer tests. If they do they will be praised in this new medium. If they don’t they will get slammed. Ex. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmpDSBAh6RY (Vincent Ferrari – AOL debacle)
Links are the most important metrics of influence in social media
- Good Blog Stat site: Nielsen BuzzMetrics’: BlogPulse
Marketer’s new job is linking perspective customers with happy current customers
Companies/Marketing will be about being content providers
- Why can’t a company give consumers as good info as newspapers?
Posted by hobokin 
