When I started my social media mar­ket­ing firm three years ago I had an advan­tage. By autumn, 2006, I had passed through New Media Strate­gies as Tech­nol­ogy Strate­gist and Edelman’s elite Pub­lic Affairs Online Advo­cacy team. Even so, my busi­ness part­ner, Mark Har­ri­son, and I made a lot of mis­takes, walked through mine fields, and even­tu­ally started tak­ing more hills than we lost.  I started Abra­ham Har­ri­son almost exactly three years ago and I would have really appre­ci­ated Friends with Ben­e­fits: A Social Media Mar­ket­ing Hand­book by Dar­ren Bare­foot and Julie Szabo. Actu­ally, I am kind of bummed that I didn’t write this book myself because I cer­tainly could have and should have — but I didn’t. (Via Mar­ket­ing Con­ver­sa­tion)

Friends with Ben­e­fits spoke to me because I have “lonely nerd” deep inside of me and this book goes all the way back into the yes­ter­years of 80s com­put­ing when I, too, was surf­ing the proto–Inter­net via a 1200-baud modem. Like the book asserts in chap­ter one, we lonely nerds weren’t lonely, “the early BBSs were actu­ally very social” and so were we. Fast-forward from the early 80s — when I was doing dial-up and geek­ing out in Hon­olulu Bul­letin Board Sys­tems — twenty years and “social media” is invented. No, re-invented.

Dar­ren Bare­foot and Julie Szabo get it and they lay it all out into this book and basi­cally wrote the book on start­ing and build­ing Abra­ham Har­ri­son — or a firm or agency like it — from scratch. And not just start­ing an agency but inte­grat­ing social media mar­ket­ing into your adver­tis­ing or PR agency or even adding smart social media capac­ity into your big, medium or even small busi­ness.  I am impressed.

Accord­ing to the book, “social media mar­ket­ing is using social media chan­nels to pro­mote your com­pany and its prod­ucts. This type of mar­ket­ing should be a sub­set of your online mar­ket­ing activ­i­ties, com­ple­ment­ing tra­di­tional web-based pro­mo­tional strate­gies like email newslet­ters and online adver­tis­ing cam­paigns. Social media mar­ket­ing qual­i­fies as a form of viral or word-of-mouth mar­ket­ing.”  The goal of Friends with Ben­e­fits is to take social media, social media mar­ket­ing, viral mar­ket­ing, and word-of-mouth mar­ket­ing and answer “so what” and “what now?”

What I like about this book is that it is not a book on Twit­ter or Face­book.  It answers what and why with a how that is com­pre­hen­sive and includes geekier-but-essential top­ics such as RSS, cor­po­rate blog­ging, and even social media news releases.   The real value of the book kicks in in chap­ter 3, “Flag­ging a Ride: Find­ing the Right Blog­gers and Com­mu­ni­ties” when the book goes into the explicit details sur­round­ing blog­ger dis­cov­ery, blog­ger prospect­ing, how to choose the right blog and blog­ger based on their type (per­sonal, top­i­cal, or cor­po­rate) and pop­u­lar­ity (size mat­ters), includ­ing how best to judge blog­gers and blogs using var­i­ous ana­lyt­ics and met­rics tools like Compete.com, Alexa Rank­ing, Google PR, and Tech­no­rati Rank. And from more instinc­tual reviews such as check­ing out Google Trends, men­tions on Google, the num­ber of RSS sub­scribers on Feed­burner, men­tions on blogrolls, pop­u­lar­ity on Twitter/Facebook/FriendFeed, fre­quency of post­ing, vol­ume of com­ments, pro­fes­sion­al­ism, etc.

Chap­ter 4 addresses Neti­quette, some­thing that a lot of books give very lit­tle lip ser­vice to — a small sac­ri­fice to Inter­net pro­to­col. Friends with Ben­e­fits offers quite a solid list of lessons in net­ti­quette: Lis­ten first, take baby steps, make friends, lay your cards on the table, blog­gers aren’t jour­nal­ists, your rep­u­ta­tion pre­cedes you, don’t be a social media spam­mer, and don’t fib — prob­a­bly the most seri­ous list I have found, and one that I have learned needs to be taken dead-seriously.  I tried to sug­gest my favorites, but they’re all impor­tant to con­sider, although mak­ing friends — spend­ing time together out­side the office, if you will — is prob­a­bly one of the most impor­tant because when you reach out to any­one for help, espe­cially when it is earned media (mean­ing you’re not pay­ing these blog­gers — or any­one — to write about you or your client), they’re going to ask, “who the hell are you?” and “do I know you?” If you’re nobody they know, peo­ple are more likely to not make deci­sions that are com­pas­sion­ate or human, they’re more likely to just assume that you’re not much bet­ter than a bot — don’t let them.

Chap­ter 5 deals with the social media pitch. Make it com­pelling, rel­e­vant, timely, exclu­sive, per­sonal, brief, com­pre­hen­sive, con­ver­sa­tional, linked, access, and offers an incen­tive (or gift, in our par­lance).  This is exactly the list I would have writ­ten — this is the list my team would have writ­ten, too. There are also warn­ing about blo­gola (pay­ola) and other unto­ward things not to do, includ­ing best prac­tices in follow-up.  In fact, the value-add of this list is amaz­ing and with a lit­tle help you could very well use Friends with Ben­e­fits as a play-book for your bur­geon­ing (or suf­fer­ing) social media prac­tice — and the only rea­son I am proud instead of threat­ened is that my com­pany actu­ally offers all the doing of the work for our clients and not just social media con­sult­ing.  That said, this book is going to put a hell of a lot of social media experts (SME) out to pas­ture when their bosses read this book and learn that their direc­tor of social media doesn’t know what he’s doing. I rec­om­mend this book to all the SMEs out there — read this before your boss does.

Chap­ter 6 is titled “Mea­sur­ing Suc­cess: How to Mon­i­tor the Web.”  This chap­ter answers quite a few ques­tions about defin­ing suc­cess and return on invest­ment (ROI), the holy grails of social media mar­ket­ing and the rea­son why too many com­pa­nies who need SMM are hes­i­tant to take the next step, boldly.  What’s smart about this chap­ter is that Bare­foot and Szabo tell it like it is: you need to ask your client and your­self how you define suc­cess.  Are you inter­ested in brand-building?  Grow­ing traf­fic?  Con­ver­sion to sales?  Social media men­tions?  Increased buzz?  How are you going to do this?  Mon­i­tor­ing?  Lis­ten­ing?  The issue of man­ag­ing expec­ta­tions is also raised.  Unlike ban­ner ads, that turn on or off like a tap, social media mar­ket­ing can be a slow-burn. Being “real­is­tic” and “hum­ble” are rec­om­mended.  Then, after dis­cussing what suc­cess could be, Friends with Ben­e­fits dis­cusses web mon­i­tor­ing and how to keep track of your suc­cesses and fail­ures and then how to follow-up.  Fol­low­ing up is key.  Mov­ing the rela­tion­ship for­ward it key, too.  Blog­gers — indeed every­one — hates being used and there are too many exam­ples of a win, a suc­cess, and a post not being followed-up with a neigh­borly thank you in the form of a pri­vate email or a pub­lic com­ment.  Remem­ber how your momma told you to be polite and to write a thank you note?  Well, come on!  Make momma proud.

Chap­ter 7 addresses risk. And there are risks, such as the cam­paign not get­ting off the ground, blog­ger back­lash, the crowd talks back, you get rejected, your ini­tia­tive dies on the vine, you put all your eggs in social media and your other chan­nels shrivel, not being proac­tive (or stay­ing in front of it), you will be mea­sures, some­one gets cold feet in the orga­ni­za­tion and the cam­paign is killed, or even get too much suc­cess too soon and you col­lapse — #fail — under its weight.  Good advice at the end: pro­ceed with cau­tion, not cow­ardice.”  In my expe­ri­ence, cam­paigns fail from lack of com­mit­ment — from fear and cow­ardice.  Before you get out there to engage, you had bet­ter be will­ing to com­mit: be brave.

Chap­ter 8 deals with dam­age con­trol and cri­sis man­age­ment and is short and sweet, deal­ing with how to deal with crises with a use­ful cri­sis man­age­ment primer.  There’s too much stuff in there that I can’t be pitch here but they do rec­om­mend that it is essen­tial to keep head of the cri­sis: cre­ate a cri­sis response doc­u­ment, cre­ate a response blog and social media plat­form (and rep­u­ta­tion) right now instead of after the cri­sis occurs (though it is never too late) and be will­ing to engage and not hide down at the bot­tom of the spi­der hole.

I am going to go through the rest of the book faster because I really believe that the most impor­tant book comes in the first 8 chap­ters. Chap­ter 9 reminds us that MySpace is still amaz­ingly rel­e­vant with about 125 mil­lion users world­wide and needs to be respected and the mem­bers can and should be engaged if appro­pri­ate.  Same thing with Chap­ter 10 on the sub­ject of Face­book, offer­ing case stud­ies, includ­ing a case study my firm took part in: Sharp’s LifeChangingBox.com cam­paign on Face­book done for Lowe NY. Chap­ter 11 deals with YouTube and other video-sharing sites. And Chap­ter 12 briefly addresses microblog­ging and Twit­ter.  Each of these chap­ters are brief primers, deal­ing a lit­tle bit with appli­ca­tions, with wid­gets, with cul­ture and pro­to­col, and a lit­tle about marketing.

To me, chap­ters 8–12 are throw-aways.  If you’re look­ing for a book on Twit­ter mar­ket­ing, there are bet­ter more com­pre­hen­sive guides. To avoid chap­ters 8–12 would have been too much of an omis­sion and social net­works sys­tems are too sexy right now to leave out; how­ever this book is invalu­able and there’s noth­ing like it out there in terms of a real­is­tic por­trayal of what works and what doesn’t.  This books teaches you to mea­sure twice and cut once and to trains the reader up on the cul­ture, the expec­ta­tions, and pro­to­col of the social web.  Folks online are not num­bers or clicks or even con­sumers, they’re peo­ple and they’re hav­ing — and have had — lots of par­ties, socials, and get-togethers before you ever got there and you need to be very respect­ful of the them and their cur­rent con­ver­sa­tion and when and if to interrupt.

This book isn’t out yet.  You’ll have to wait as I reviewed an advance gal­ley of the final book.  What I would do is pre-order the book — it is sure to be some­thing you will con­sume and maybe keep to your­self as your very own com­pet­i­tive advan­tage.  Now that I see that the book was pro­duced by No Starch Press I kick myself again — I pitched them on this book three years ago. Oh well, like I said at the begin­ning of this post, the best man and woman won.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.

Tweet It! Buzz This Post Deli­cious Digg This Post Face­book Red­dit Stum­ble This Post