A New Must-Read: The Art of Social Media

I love a good book. I love a good, relevant social media book even more. I’ve read many titles from various social media professionals, but Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick’s The Art of Social Media is a new one to the must-read list. I was fortunate to be one of the beta readers for this book so I got a sneak peek into what lies in store for you 🙂

Not familiar with Guy and Peg?

Guy Kawasaki is the chief evangelist of Canva, an online design service, and an executive fellow of the Haas School of Business at U.C. Berkeley. Previously, he was the chief evangelist of Apple and special advisor to the CEO of the Motorola business unit of Google. His many acclaimed books include The Art of the Start and Enchantment.

Peg Fitzpatrick is a social media strategist and popular blogger writing on her own website and across the web. Peg has spearheaded successful social-media campaigns for Motorola, Audi, Google, and Virgin as well as having been a brand ambassador for Kimpton Hotels. The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users is her first book.

I first got to know Peg through the now-disbanded Social Solutions Collective. From the get-go her knowledge of social media tactics and strategies were amazing. She really rocks Pinterest and does a fabulous job with it. Peg is someone who I have come to trust and respect in this industry. Of course everyone knows Guy – his Google Plus posts range from totally random to on-point however he really knows his stuff. Guy is one of the biggest names in social media. Put he and Peg together and BAM. We get this awesome gift of a book from them.

Enough about them, let’s talk about the book.

This book is written with the assumption that you know the basics of social media. The 12 “How-To” chapters (with over 100 tips) cover everything from profiles to content to community growth to just rocking it. Here are some highlights I found valuable…

From Chapter 1, “How to Optimize Your Profile”:

• Optimize for 5 seconds. It’s important to craft your profile carefully, but let’s be honest here. We all just glance and do not really study it.
• Craft a mantra. What will your tagline be?
• Go anonymous. Browsers have this awesome little-known mode called “incognito”. You can browse without having your identity revealed.

From Chapter 2, “How to Feed the Content Monster”:

• Pass the reshare test. Resharing is the ultimate compliment on social media. When you write something – an article or a post – is it something that will be reshared?
• Piggyback on curation and aggregation services. Their list of sites for this is awesome. This is something we should all be taking advantage of.

From Chapter 3, “How to Perfect Your Posts”:

• Be curious or as they put it, ABC (always be curious). Find what works for you. No two “experts” will give you the same answer. Do what’s best for you.
• Be defiant. I LOVE LOVE LOVE that they point out their opinion about SEO (which I agree with). I’m not going to tell you what they said here – you have to read the book! The point is to buck the trend.

From Chapter 5, “How to Integrate Social Media and Blogging”:

• Meet people in real life. You can make great relationships on social media, but meeting them face-to-face takes it to a new level.
• “Peg” your posts. If you’ve followed Peg long enough, you’ll immediately know what this means. If not, look up #67 in the book and you’ll get all the details. Hint: it’s how to maximize your articles with social media.

From Chapter 6, “How to Get More Followers”:

• Best quote from this chapter, “There are only two kinds of people on social media: those who want more followers and those who are lying.”

From Chapter 7, “How to Socialize Events”:

• Dedicate a person. I’ve done this at events – it’s VERY important to have someone designated to handle the social for your event – it saves many headaches for the organizers.
• Provide wireless access. OMG Yes.

From Chapter 10, “How to Avoid Looking Clueless”:

• Don’t ask people to follow you. My honest opinion? This is tacky. I will ignore requests to follow or like something unless it’s from a friend or someone I respect.
• Don’t call yourself a guru or an expert. I’ve written several posts on this. I think a book needs to be written on this topic alone.

From Chapter 11, “How to Optimize for Individual Platforms”:

• My favorite from this chapter is the opening quote. It brings be back to my Marketing 101 classes in college. From Guy himself…”The 5 p’s of social media: Google+ is for passions; Facebook is for people; LinkedIn is for pimping; Pinterest is for pictures; Twitter is for perception.”

These are just my favorite highlights of the book. It will be on my recommend list of reading for all social media pros, both seasoned and new. I could write a whole book on this book, but then you wouldn’t feel the need to go buy it. So, go buy it! You can get it on Amazon here.

I hope you enjoy this book as much as I did. Oh, when you do get it – look up the 10th name on the Acknowledgements page 😉