Safko, Lon and Brake, David K. The Social Media Bible. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2009. ISBN: 978-0-470-41155-1.
Meet the Authors
Lon Safko is an innovator and professional speaker with more than twenty years experience in entrepreneurship, marketing, sales, strategic partnering, and e-commerce. He is the founder of eight sucessful companies, including Paper Models, Inc. and LonSafko.com.
David K. Brake is the CEO and founder of Content Connections, a company that uses social media strategies to help clients build economically viable relationships around their content. Read his blog or follow him on Twitter.
Book Basics
According to the authors, the book is intended to be “part reference work, part how-to manual, and part business strategy book” (p.xii). In reality, it is three pounds and over 800 pages of information that attempts to create a truly comprehensive social media resource. The book is divided into three parts: Background Basics and Tactics, Tools, and Strategy. As reference work, it excels and goes to great lengths to provide greater historical data and background information on each topic than most readers would expect. As a how-to manual it is adequate, but would be more useful with more guided hands-on exercises. As a business strategy book it leaves something to be desired. For more information visit the book’s website.
So What?
The authors divide social media resources into fifteen categories. As you read each category, pause and list every resource you can think of that fits within it. How many of these categories do you already use as a part of your social media strategy? How can you use your existing options more effectively? How can you strategically incorporate new resources to help achieve your overall goals?
- Social Networking
- Publish
- Photo Sharing
- Audio
- Video
- Microblogging
- Livecasting
- Virtual Worlds
- Gaming
- Productivity Applications
- Aggregators
- RSS
- Search
- Mobile
- Interpersonal