Books related to social media marketing keep coming out. The truth is that even if Internet and social media marketing aren’t new, the information needs for marketing managers are huge: the more they read, the faster they will get the immersion feel enabling them to move from a tactical use of social media to a strategic management of social media campaigns.

Not all books are equally valuable, though. Count Facebook Marketing an hour a day by Chris Treadaway (@ctreada) and Mari Smith (@MariSmith) among the great ones. Unpretentious and practical, it takes you by the hand and shows you how Facebook can work for you, as an individual with a personal practice, or as a social “editor-in-chief” for your company. Even if you believe that you already “know” a lot, read this book as it’s quite possible that you might not yet be taking full advantage of what you “know.” 

The first chapter is one of the simplest and best written short history of Internet Marketing I have seen in a while; it summarizes how customer targeting is quickly evolving towards building up coherent sets of motivated and intention-driven social commerce addressees, and takes you to the second chapter on what Facebook is: a platform that brings people to real or virtual places or stores based on who they are, what they like, or what they are looking for. In other words,  people who have described themselves in their own terms.  Based on this understanding of the potential of Facebook as a sales and marketing platform, you are able to define your “social media product,” because “the social media presence is, in effect, an interactive online product.” Promoting or positioning this “product” requires a structured view of your social media project, so start with the beginning: Create a campaign. Facebook Marketing is one of the few books reminding you of this simple, yet critical concept of “campaign”: it’s what kicks off the entire work process and your operational plan.

Chapters 4 to 7 take you through a month-by-month (as well as week-by-week and day-by-day) planning and execution plan. This is yet another real plus of this book: the authors are hands-on practitioners sincerely willing to transfer their own experience and turn you into empowered, rather than dogmatic, professionals. Because measurable success will not come overnight. It’s the result of an iterative process composed of a collection of adjustments, experiments, and reassessments. “Remember,” the authors warn, “these projects involve a lot of trials and errors.” So, generally speaking, no matter how convinced you may be that you are cutting edge, always temper your own expectations, don’t over-promise, and measure impact and results like crazy.

The last three chapters offer a variety of tips and advice – from leveraging Facebook apps to picking up the right people and vendors – and invite you to remain on the look out. Facebook has quickly become a marketing power-kingdom. Continued learning will be part of your continued success. Incidentally, keep abreast with the authors’ sites and wisdom.

Note: The authors mention a few software products at the end of the book, including ObjectiveMarketer, a company for which I am a Board Member. The platform specifically focuses on the end-to-end management of social media campaigns- from the planning stage across a team to the distribution across multiple media channels, all the way to the analytics evaluating the effectiveness of messages.

Written by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust is for everybody, including folks who think that they have already achieved the status of being “trust agents,” and who believe they know all the ropes and tricks of the social media business. I say this from the start because a young entrepreneur was telling me that this book addresses people either looking for Trust Agents or hoping to become one. “Do you see yourself as a Trust Agent?” I asked. “Kind of,” he responded somewhat coquettishly, immediately mentioning that he had thousands of followers on Twitter for his company. He “had a reputation,” and he had “earned it.” As if any reputation were a “good” one by default (the internet version of “any publicity is good publicity”)! As if a “good” reputation at any given time entitled anybody or any company to be trusted in perpetuity. Madoff was a “Trust Agent” in his field, and remained so for a long time mainly because people are so scared at the idea of trusting people that they are even more scared at the idea of questioning the trust they have placed in them… All of this to say that this book addresses anybody: the perpetweeters who feel like inductees into the Web-pantheon — yet can be dismantled as easily as any statues – and, of course, those who wonder how to expand their influence.

The book is structured around the six main features of a Trust Agent:

1.     They make they own game. Nothing to do with ego packaging. They are the people who set new rules and provide a novel or interesting perspective on things.

2.     They are “one of us.” The expression “social media” maybe somewhat redundant, except that the Web can also be the playing ground of antisocial nerds and weirdos. Trust Agents are people we can relate to and care about others.

3.     They understand the principle of the lever – or the Archimedes effect (”Give me a place on which to stand, and I will move the earth”) and empower others.

4.     They are marvel-ous connectors — they have the power of an “Agent Zero.” “No matter where they go, trust agents have a desire to connect good people together.” They are not mere networkers and are more like relationship facilitators.

5.     They are human artists. On the Web, we are deprived on 93 percent of all the human signals (38 percent vocal tones and 55 percent body movement), which exposes anybody to a number of blunders. They understand the subtle aesthetics and the etiquette of communication.

6.     They know how to “build an army.” You can’t do it alone. But how can you best convince thousands of ronin and lone rangers to join in and follow? The loyalty of people is first and foremost your loyalty, as a Trust Agent, to them. The Kmart incident (http://www.chrisbrogan.com/advertising-and-trust/) let the authors realize that “there are agreements, often implicit, between people and that these social contracts need to be clear and understood at all times.”

The chapter “Build an Army” ends with an interesting statement: “Most of the meat of the business isn’t in using these [social media] tools, but rather in how they are applied uniquely to your organization.” The how requires a new type of skill, and tellingly enough, the conclusion of the book starts with an interesting statement: “Business, it feels, is becoming an art,” the art of humanizing people that you may never see, and at looking at a random collection of people as real human beings emotionally connected by what the authors often call a “social contract.” Push marketers are doomed to belong to another age, and social media marketing, still kind of a sidekick in marketing organizations, will be the cornerstone of the next marketing age – one governed by a completely new understanding of the value of customer service. 

I like this book for many reasons. It’s pragmatic and offers actionable advice to individuals and business leaders. I like the underlying assumption of a good-natured, transparence-driven popular sovereignty of digital natives that trust agents must respect to remain trust agents – and not turn into a body of traders controlling the social media business. I was interested by the fact that it is written by two authors who end up complementing each other as they express the complexity of a social media scene, the strange confluence of behaviors that we have caught from living on the Internet for the last 15 years, playing computer and video games (from the first SimCity to MMO games), reading American comic-books while still breathing in the real world.

A little while ago, Julien Smith offered an interesting tweet: “if websites were people” with an image from http://imgur.com. Each individual may be all these personas at once — yes, building effective social marketing campaigns will require art and science.

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

For more information:

http://www.chrisbrogan.com

http://www.inoveryourhead.net

http://imgur.com is an image sharer created by Alan Schaaf (www.alanschaaf.com), a computer science at Ohio University.