Last week, I brought The Face­book Era book by Clara Shih to the gym. The pub­lisher had sent me the book eons ago but it wasn’t until last week that I finally had some time to read it.  I fin­ished it up in just a cou­ple hours of read­ing on machines at the gym.

It is a use­ful book, to be sure. It is prac­ti­cal and holds your hand and addresses your con­cerns, as long as you’re a busi­ness owner who is con­sid­er­ing get­ting into Social Media as a busi­ness tool. If you’re a fan of Salesforce.com, you’ll appre­ci­ate the smarts here since Ms. Shih is a Sales­force alum and the for­ward is by Marc R.  Benioff, Chair­man and CEO of Salesforce.com.

The book does pro­mote Salesforce.com a lit­tle shame­lessly but it doesn’t hurt the neu­tral­ity of the text: you’ll get good advice on how to lever­age Social Net­works, Social Media, Online Com­mu­nity, and Web 2.0 to man­age, pro­mote, offer ser­vice on behalf of you, your brand, or your company.

What I really liked was Part I, A Brief His­tory of Social Media, which is a bril­liant primer for peo­ple who didn’t actu­ally live through the pre­cur­sors and fore­shad­ow­ing of Face­book and Twit­ter; how­ever, for me, it showed me that Clara Shih under­stands the con­tin­uum of tech­nol­ogy, com­put­ing, com­mu­nity, plat­form, and how they evolved over time.

Other top­ics you might really love to explore, though they’re less prac­ti­cal and a lit­tle more philo­soph­i­cal, but in a good way, and explore ways to use Social Media to develop strate­gies for your busi­ness for Social Sales, Social Net­work Mar­ket­ing, Social Inno­va­tion, and Social Recruit­ing.  What’s great about this part, Part II, is that these teach­ings are pretty plat­form agnos­tic, giv­ing you skills in tools not lim­ited to just Face­book, the pri­mary focus of this book.  What this means is that this book will even be use­ful to you when Face­book dies and some­thing else rises up in its place.

At the end of the day, most folks who buy the book will skip to Part III: Your Step-By-Step Guide to Using Face­book for Busi­ness.  Fair enough. It is pretty com­pre­hen­sive and walks you through more than phi­los­o­phy, it gets you onto Face­book and mar­ket­ing, sell­ing, recruit­ing, prospect­ing, brand­ing, relat­ing, engag­ing, and par­tic­i­pat­ing if you take some time and fol­low the steps.

Is this book good?  Well, it is if you spend a lit­tle time open­ing your mind and read­ing through Part I and Part II — and do it away from a com­puter.  If you get into con­text, read the case stud­ies, explore some of the exam­ples and best prac­tices, Part III will make more sense and you will do a bet­ter job and be more effective.

Did the book bore me?  Nope, I liked it, and that makes me happy because I am not being paid to read these things, it is just flat­ter­ing to receive free review copies — it makes me feel like I am impor­tant and influ­en­tial!Chris Abra­ham is co-founder and prin­ci­pal of Abra­ham Har­ri­son LLC, an inter­na­tional con­sult­ing group with spe­cial­ties in online word-of-mouth/conversation mar­ket­ing and online busi­ness & tech­nol­ogy strat­egy advis­ing. See his pro­file, con­tact Chris via email, Twit­ter, or leave a com­ment below.