Book Review: The Art of Social Media by Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick

The Art of Social Media by Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick

I had been hearing about the birthing pains of The Art of Social Media for some time. Peg went to school with my husband and as a result is one of my Facebook friends so I’ve been able to vicariously watch the book’s progress as it developed. Of course, I was intrigued.

As a little bit of author background, Guy was the special adviser to the CEO of the Motorola business at Google. Peg is a social-media strategist and director of digital media for Kreussler Inc. Both of these people live and breathe social media and they know their stuff.

A few weeks back, I reviewed a book on social media specifically for writers. It was a good non-overwhelming start into the basics of what a writer needs to do in order to be visible on the internet. The Art of Social Media is the next step. It’s what you need to do to take your social media presence beyond basic and to the next level.

The Art of Social Media is organized into 123 tips for marketing and promoting what it is you want to “sell” using Social Media. As writers, and as writers who fervently desire to be published, you’re going to need to know this information at some point, so pay attention.

Peg and Guy have many effective suggestions and tips based from actual experience. In fact, there are so many suggestions that you might feel like you’ll never have enough time to do your social media, as well as do your writing.

But here’s the thing, you don’t have to do it all. You need to pick and choose what will work best for your platform and don’t do what won’t. To that end, you need to know what’s out there to use because as we all know, you can’t use it if you don’t know about it. Peg and Guy do an outstanding job of explaining what tools are available and how best to use and manage them. Some of the tips are common sense (or at least should be) like “Don’t Swear.” Other tips give you a bit more to chew on, like the tips for managing Pinterest and SlideShare.

The book was originally written as an ebook that contained many hyperlinks (up to 6 on a page) that if clicked, will automatically take you to the reference on the internet. This obviously doesn’t translate well to a hardcopy. Although it would be fairly easy to locate the links (using searches and going to websites) for some this might be an unforgivable annoyance. If that’s you, purchase the ebook and stay away from the hardcopy.

Chapter 12, though, ties everything together and, in my humble opinion, is worth the price of the hardcopy just so that you can have the list in front of you. It’s titled “How to put everything together.” In the chapter the authors spell out what needs to be done for a non-fiction book release, starting with Building the Foundation, Amassing your Digital Assets and then Going to Market. It is a detailed step-by-step online marketing plan.

Here’s another tip, this very same plan could also be used for a fiction book, a series of magazine articles, or virtually any product you’ve created that you want to sell to the world. That chapter is a gold mine for anyone who plans to self-market.

If you tried to use every tool in the book, I’m afraid that you might be spending too much of your time doing social media and not your writing, however, if you followed some of the guidelines, especially those for sharing blog posts on various platforms and cleaning up your biographies – you’d pretty much be guaranteed to increase your numbers.

And like it or not, in the end it’s your numbers that potential publishers will find truly impressive.

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Wendy Thomas is an award winning journalist, columnist, and blogger who believes that taking challenges in life will always lead to goodness. She is the mother of 6 funny and creative kids and it is her goal to teach them through stories and lessons.

Wendy’s current project involves writing about her family’s experiences with chickens (yes, chickens). (www.simplethrift.wordpress.com) She writes about her chickens for GRIT, Backyard Poultry, Chicken Community, and Mother Earth News.