This is a book review of The Social Media Marketing Book by Dan Zarrella of  Dan Zarrella.com.

How I got the book:

Review copy sent to me by O’Reilly Media.

Background:

Dan Zarrella is an inbound marketing manager for Hubspot.com.  He refers to himself as “The Social Media & Marketing Scientist” within his personal branding and on his blog.  He has written and presented a great deal of content concerning viral marketing, particularly viral marketing through Twitter as well as research concerning the content of Tweets (messages sent using Twitter) and ReTweets (the process of copying and sending another Twitter user’s Tweet, used to share information with other Twitter users).

The title of the book is pretty self-explanatory:  this book is a collection of information about using social media as a part of your organization’s marketing strategy.

The strengths:

This is a very good introduction to the basics of social media marketing.  It gives an overview of the basic building blocks of social media, including blogs; multi-media; microblogging; social networking; social news and bookmarking; and older but still valuable tools like forums.  Within each section, Zarrella introduces the tool, talks about its history, and describes the protocols for using each tool.  He provides examples of websites and applications that represent each category of tool.  Zarrella chose to go “wide” instead of “deep” in this book and it’s a good strategy for a reader who’s new to social media marketing.

I like the fact that Zarrella links blogging back to journaling and notes that the practice has been around for (literally) thousands of years.  At the same time, though, he rightly points out that blogs have evolved to be powerful content management systems.

Twitter is clearly one of Zarrella’s strengths and he packs a lot of useful information in a small number of pages.

I think it’s very good that strategy, tactics, practices and measurement are discussed in the book, although I think they don’t get as much emphasis as the tools themselves.

There are loads of interesting and useful tips in this book.  Zarrella also provides anecdotes from various social media gurus and notables to share their wisdom.

The areas for improvement:

I have a couple of quibbles with this book.  In the greater scheme of things, they are  minor, but I still want to mention them in case they are useful.

This book is written in first person, but the author isn’t properly introduced until the end of the book.  Yes, we know the author’s name by looking at the cover of the book and a tiny bit about him by looking at the back cover.  But we don’t really find out who he is and what he does until we read the About The Author page at the back of the book.  It’s like the book is written by a faceless, anonymous individual who we’re supposed to assume that we know, although hints and clues are dropped throughout.  However, if this book is really designed as an introduction to social media marketing, chances are the reader probably won’t have heard of Dan Zarrella.  They also might be wondering why there are several references to his employer and their offerings in the book if this is a generic guide for the social media practitioner.  I know this is being really picky, but I found the effect to be jarring, even though I know who Dan is and what he does.  By contrast, in Trust Agents, Chris Brogan and Julien Smith take the time to introduce themselves early in the book to establish a somewhat more personal touch.  I think Chris has a higher profile than Dan, but Chris made the point of assuming that the reader didn’t know who he is.  It would have been a better move for Dan to properly introduce himself at the beginning of the book when the book was being written in the first person.

Second, I think that a better title for this book would have been The Social Media Marketing Tools Book.  I say that because I think there’s a whole side of social media marketing that Dan doesn’t discuss in much detail:  the social or human side of social media marketing.  I’m not a marketer and I’m an amateur (but reasonably experienced) social media user, but the thing that should distinguish social media marketing from traditional marketing is the human element:  interaction with consumers, clients, and potential leads through social media tools.  Traditional marketing tools are largely one-way using older media like print, television, and radio to send messages from the producer to the consumer.  Social media tools facilitate and encourage communication between both parties when used correctly, with the classic examples of companies like Dell’s websites and Twitter presence, Comcast’s Frank Eliason, and Zappos.  And, to be fair, Zarrella references these examples, as well as other examples of how social media tools can backfire (e.g. embarrassing YouTube videos).  In short, this is a tools-centric book and a bit lacking on the social or human side.  That’s why I have a problem with the title, but not a huge one.

Other points of interest:

Zarrella makes a point of including the HTML code for embedding YouTube videos into a blog or other web page, which I thought was a useful tip.

I think this book should be included as a “starter” pack of several other books about social media and web presence.  At this point in my reading, I’d couple it with Friends With Benefits, which goes in more depth on some of these topics.

Verdict (out of 10): 8  (recommended; good overview of the field with plenty of useful tips)

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