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By now it's clear that whether you're promoting a business, a product, or yourself, social media is near the top of what determines your success or failure. And there are countless pundits, authors, and consultants eager to advise you. But there's no one quite like Guy Kawasaki, the legendary former chief evangelist for Apple and one of the pioneers of business blogging, tweeting, Facebooking, Tumbling, and much, much more. Now Guy has teamed up with Peg Fitzpatrick, who he says is the best social-media person he's ever met, to offer The Art of Social Media-the one essential guide you need to get the most bang for your time, effort, and money. With over one hundred practical tips, tricks, and insights, Guy and Peg present a bottom-up strategy to produce a focused, thorough, and compelling presence on the most popular social-media platforms. They guide you through steps to build your foundation, amass your digital assets, optimize your profile, attract more followers, and effectively integrate social media and blogging.… (more)
Description
But there’s no one quite like Guy Kawasaki, the legendary former chief evangelist for Apple and one of the pioneers of business blogging, tweeting, Facebooking, Tumbling, and much, much more. Now Guy has teamed up with Peg Fitzpatrick, who he says is the best social-media person he’s ever met, to offer The Art of Social Media—the one essential guide you need to get the most bang for your time, effort, and money.
With over one hundred practical tips, tricks, and insights, Guy and Peg present a bottom-up strategy to produce a focused, thorough, and compelling presence on the most popular social-media platforms. They guide you through steps to build your foundation, amass your digital assets, optimize your profile, attract more followers, and effectively integrate social media and blogging.
For beginners overwhelmed by too many choices as well as seasoned professionals eager to improve their game, The Art of Social Media is full of tactics that have been proven to work in the real world. Or as Guy puts it, “great stuff, no fluff.”
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Guy Kawasaki is a very busy person. He is constantly searching for shareable content, beefing up blog posts, timing tweets and experimenting with online services (especially new ones) that will help him do more with all the above. He recommends using every tool
His book is a super fast, jam packed tour of his social media life. It has more than a hundred links to pages that expand what he writes about (so it’s best to buy the e-book because they’re not spelled out in print). It is a very userfriendly manual.
It is also very singleminded. It recommends you give your life to reposting other people’s findings, written and photographic, and keep up the pace indefinitely. That will give you credibility and followers. It’s basically a business. You brand yourself and constantly hype your presence, without also hyping your talents and accomplishments, goals and desires (That would be crass). Ultimately, it seems enormously shallow, robotic and numbing, as all social media has been criticized as both being and promoting. But not to him.
Kawasaki is as usual, forthright and effervescent. He fears no critics and lives the bold life he recommends. He tells it straight and hard, and you have to take it, because he’s living proof it works. He is that exception we give license to.
Possibly the wisest among the many wise things in The Art of Social Media, is that “social media guru” is any oxymoron, because nobody really knows how social media works, including the authors. What they do is latch onto every platform and work it, and leverage it. What does well they do more of. The most successful tactic (and most oft repeated direction) is to use graphics. Attach them to every post and tweet you can. Make different sizes of them and use them to draw visitors to your blog post, from as many different social sites as you can. Like movie posters. It’s the old: repetition is the soul of advertising, combined with: a picture is worth a thousand words. How could that possibly be wrong? Ever?
If you’re willing to take the full plunge, this is the book for it. If not, you can be amazed at how intricate and involved simple social interaction has become.
David Wineberg
If you are an indie writer, blogger, or someone who wants to learn
This easy read (I think I knocked it out in 3-4 sessions) is less focused on individual services, but the principles shared will help you develop an overall social media strategy. When the Next Big Buzz social platform makes its appearance, you should be able to master it quickly.
This is not to say that you don’t learn a lot about Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, SlideShare, Google+ and Pinterest. You’ll pick up stuff about optimizing posts for each of these platforms, mastering the use of hashtags across services, and trying to understand how each platform adds stuff to your newsfeed.
I co-authored a book on social media ("Build Your Author Platform: The New Rules"), and am happy to say that Kawasaki and Fitzpatrick don’t contradict anything we said there. I’ll also say that I learned things from this book, particularly about Pinterest. You’ll learn new things too, no matter how far along you are in your social media journey.
Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick have between them mastered all the social media tools you'll want to use. This book is a short, clear, practical presentation of what Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google , and Pinterest are good for, and how you can use them. Social media platforms are also, of course, opportunities to make a fool of yourself before a public of a size almost unimaginable for the average person twenty years ago. There are also helpful pointers here on how to avoid doing that. This includes guidance on the ways the different platforms are different. What's acceptable on Facebook isn't what is acceptable on LinkedIn, or Twitter, or Pinterest. Go hashtag-happy on Pinterest, but be more restrained on Twitter, for instance. You'll find guidance on how to present yourself effectively, both to potential future employers and to peers.
I want to emphasize that this book is clear. You won't be left with useful-sounding platitudes but then find when you try to follow them that the specifics you need aren't there. The specifics are here, including visuals where that's helpful.
Highly recommended.
I received a free electronic galley of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.
Guy delivers on the promise in the title. Power tips for Power users. Much to absorb and use for increasing positive visibility of a business or organization.
I have recently switched to Twitter and am happy with that change. I’d like to figure out how to use it,
Kawasaki and Fitzpatrick are big names in the arena of social media. They’ve experimented with social media platforms extensively and have learned to “game” the system for the purposes of business. They share their wisdom in this book.
Of course, social media is a changing thing. This book was written five years ago, and the algorithms continue to change. Nonetheless, most of their advice still rings true to my experience. This book is packaged into 12 chapters and 123 digestible tips. Each tip is explored in a few paragraphs.
The audience of people who long to have a more expansive social-media presence should read this book. Of course, much of the landscape (and much of the gains) have already went to the early birds. Nonetheless, the new format is with us to stay.