A Roadmap for the Social Media Maze

Social Media Engagement for Dummies – Aliza Sherman and Danielle Elliot Smith (Wiley)

A quick look at any number of infographics that have been created in the past couple of years cover the explosion of social media outlets and it quickly become clear that the way we do business has changed dramatically and we’re going to need a roadmap to guide us through this ever increasingly tangled web of sites.

Clearly this is not a “build it and they will come” kind of thing; you need a strategy and a plan to execute. Aliza Sherman, founder of Cybergirl Inc. a full service internet company and Danielle Elliot Smith founder of ExtraordinaryMommy.com among many others, are multi-talented and engaged on a number of levels in guiding folks through the complexities of the social media maze. They have offered up a tremendous set of tools in the form of their new book Social Media Engagement for Dummies.

 

While some may scoff at the For Dummies books as a guide to the basics, sort of training wheels for the uninformed, I find them to be useful compendiums that I turn to for quick reference and often times inspiration. Sherman and Smith do breakdown the basics of social media, but also delve into helping you learn from their missteps and help you drill down into ways of being more effective and truly targeting your audience to maximize results.

They also help to broaden your horizons beyond the standard Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and Google + routes. It’s not just a matter of bombing your audience with messages; it’s about developing the right message and the right method to make that message impactful. Sherman and Smith make path easier to follow and you will quickly find your copy of Social Media Engagement for Dummies dog eared and underlined just like mine.

Michael Hyatt – Platform: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World (Thomas Nelson)

I have a dual confession to make…I love to read books on business, leadership and marketing, but I never buy them when they are new. I am amazed the tidbits and strategy that I have picked up on over the years that I use in my own business and my “day job” but I don’t get sucked into the latest and greatest “must have” books.

Why you ask? Call me cheap, but more often than not business people jump on the latest trendy thing, rush out and buy these books, are excited to dive right in and then about 3 chapters in the brakes lock up and book ends up collecting dust on the shelf. Then six months later they get donated to a local charity sale or end up in a yard sale and that’s where I come in!

I think more often than not, these kinds of books offer great ideas, but don’t offer the easily actionable steps that allow people to put the strategies into action. And I think that is exactly what sets the latest book from best seller author Michael Hyatt apart from the shelves of other similar books.

In Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World Hyatt lays out an easy, step-by-step road map for building your personal brand. While many business strategy books offer lofty platitudes about process improvement and paradigm shifts, Hyatt literally walks the user through the process in a manner that doesn’t go so far as saying his way is the only way, certainly offers guidance through the process.

Hyatt further illustrates many of the steps with how he himself has not only used the process, but also made missteps and errors along the way and how to avoid the pitfalls. I found myself for the first time since college taking a highlighter to a book and keeping a notebook handy to jot down the ideas that Platform generated along the way.

When you ponder the so-called fire hose of information that we deal with a daily basis with things like: websites, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and other social media outlets, it can seem like a daunting task to deal with all that’s involved, whether you are starting your own business, an established business or charged with marketing for a company. Hyatt helps to pare that process down to manageable bits.

He not only addresses the something to sell or say, he also tackles the development of your business or product; after all it is the foundation upon which your platform is built.

The problem I ran into during the course of reading Platform was that it generated so many good action steps that it can seem overwhelming. Hyatt does a nice job of reminding the reader that building their platform is a process and it can and should be done over the course of time. Which is why, at Hyatt’s suggestion, I now find myself using Evernote to keep track of everything that is on my plate!

I can guarantee that Platform: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World will end up on your desk for you to refer to often rather than gathering dust on your bookshelf.