College of Business book review by Dr
College of Business book review by Dr. James W. Busbin
Title: “Guerrilla Social Media Marketing”
Author: Jay Conrad Levinson and Shane Gibson
Publisher: Entrepreneur Press
Length: 250 pages
Price: $21.95 (paperback)
Reading time: 6-8 hours
Reading rating: 8 (1 = very difficult; 10 = very easy)
Overall rating: 4 (1 = average; 4 = outstanding)
The authors of “Guerrilla Social Media Marketing” address a topic that has been growing like wildfire – the use of social media outlets as a tool to help market businesses and products. The use of social media has been increasing at exponential rates over the past several years – this innovation in the nature of communication is proving to be a turning point in how people seek and process information in their lives. Through social media, the news comes to people, instead of people having to go find the news. And the same might said of products – with social media products and services find the consumers who need them, instead of consumers having to search for what they need.
This book is an extension of a long line of Guerilla Marketing books aimed at helping small businesses succeed by using less expensive, innovative means by which to market their products. The notion is that many small businesses cannot afford to use traditional mass media advertising outlets such as television. In this application social media are perfect since it is a set of tools and websites that are for the most part, free. Social media include blogs, photo-sharing sites, video-sharing sites, social networks, audio podcasts, and internet radio shows as well as many social sharing and communication tools.
On this subject, this book provides one-stop-shopping for businesses looking to both understand the mechanics of social media, as well as how to put social media to work for them in marketing and selling their products and services. The authors begin with a couple of chapters on how to change ones way of thinking about marketing, branding and selling – traditional ways of thinking need to be forsaken. For example, social media is more like a conversation in which a sale takes place rather than a channel through which you advertise. Thus, one must adopt a bi-directional philosophy of marketing designed to engage in a conversation with the marketplace.
Later, the authors get down to assembling the tools in your social media arsenal – laptops, cameras, smart phones, webcams, and all the software needed to bring together your social media management and content plan. And of course, the book walks the reader through the several dozen web sites, networks, and social media access points along with their potential uses for businesses in marketing and selling. The section on “Nano-Blogging Weapons” was particularly interesting – these are the small-size, comment-style sites such as Twitter. For example, Tweeter has about 100 million users, and search. can allow one to research what they are talking about in real time – and then to instantly reach out and plug into an active conversation. The authors even cover how to use Twellow for global marketing.
The last sections of “Guerilla Social Media Marketing” are devoted to measuring your success. The authors dispel the notion that it is difficult to measure results when using social media marketing – in fact, they show how just the opposite is true. The extent of tracking software and linkage displays allow a business to exactly see where their social media marketing efforts are paying off, and how to attach that directly to profit. Or in other words, the authors provide a start-to-finish, how-to book on using social media marketing to directly generate profits that would have otherwise not been there – a very compelling argument for any business reader.
Dr. James Busbin is a marketing professor in the College of Business at Western Carolina University. His research and consulting focus is on new product development and competitive strategy. For previously reviewed books, visit our web site at wcu.edu/cob/.
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