Skip to main content

Book Review: “The Facebook Marketing Book”

I joined LinkedIn way back in 2005. I started this blog in October 2006. I was on Twitter early enough that the handle ‘paulrjones’ was still available. In fact, it was so soon after it went live that the early adopters… tip of the hat to Jason Alba … who turned me onto it were using Twitter to enable lunchtime meetups.

My LinkedIn account was half-finished for years before I could imagine any value in completing it. The blog paid off right away, but the value of Twitter puzzled me for months after I started using it.

I’ve known about Facebook since the time when it was still limited to college-aged students. I joined Facebook pretty early, too. But I doubt if there’s anyone with the reach of these words that uses Facebook less than me. Simply put, Facebook leaves me cold.

And that’s a problem for a marketer, because Facebook is close to being a marketer’s… and a cause marketer’s… dream.

That’s why I was so glad when the friendly folks at O’Reilly, the tech publishers (et al), sent me a review copy of The Facebook Marketing Book, by Dan Zarrella and Allison Zarrella.

The Facebook Marketing Book is arranged almost as picture book with long captions. As you open a page spread on the left hand side is a screen grab or a graphic. On the right are two or three or four paragraphs of explanatory text.

Ambrose Bierce, the acid-tongued satirist and author of The Devil’s Dictionary once reviewed a book by writing, “the covers of this book are too far apart.” Ouch!

But the covers aren’t too far apart here. The arrangement and brevity of the book is actually a selling point for me. Any more and I’d have never gotten through it.

The Facebook Marketing Book is like eating a fancy cupcake; there’s enough to satisfy, but not too much to lead to diminishing returns. And anyone who watched Brendan Frasier in “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor,” knows what I mean by diminishing returns.

Since almost everything in the book was new to me, I’m not sure what bon mots from the book to share with you my faithful readers. The pages on how to use keywords in Facebook for SEO struck me as important. I appreciated the discussion on when to use Facebook Pages, when to use Profiles and when to choose Groups. The pages in chapter 10 on promotions were pithy and helpful. Chapter 12 on analytics and ROI gave me an idea about this blog.

If, like me, you’re a rookie on marketing with Facebook, The Facebook Marketing Book is a nice bite-sized introduction.

Here are the chapter titles:
  1. Introduction to Social Networking
  2. Facebook Profile Basics
  3. Facebook Page Basics
  4. Facebook Group Basics
  5. Facebook Events
  6. Facebook Application Basics
  7. Customizing Your Facebook Page
  8. Developing a Facebook Content Strategy
  9. Cross-Promoting Content on Facebook
  10. Facebook Page Management
  11. Advertising on Facebook
  12. Analytics and ROI
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part 2: How Chili's Used Cause-Related Marketing to Raise $8.2 million for St. Jude

[Bloggers Note: In this second half of this post I discuss the nuts and bolts of how Chili's motivates support from its employees and managers and how St. Jude 'activates' support from Chili's. Read the first half here.] How does St. Jude motivate support from Chili’s front line employees and management alike? They call it ‘activation’ and they do so by the following: They share stories of St. Jude patients who were sick and got better thanks to the services they received at the hospital. Two stories in particular are personal for Chili’s staff. A Chili’s bartender in El Dorado Hills, California named Jeff Eagles has a younger brother who was treated at St. Jude. In both 2005 and 2006 Eagles was the campaign’s biggest individual fundraiser. John Griffin, a manager at the Chili’s in Conway, Arkansas had an infant daughter who was treated for retinoblastoma at St. Jude. They drew on the support Doug Brooks… the president and CEO of Brinker International, Chili’s parent co...
Post a Comment
Read more

Cause-Related Marketing with Customer Receipts

Walgreens and JDRF Right now at Walgreens…the giant pharmacy and retail store chain with more than 5,800 stores in the United States and Puerto Rico… they’re selling $1 paper icons for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF). This is an annual campaign and I bought one to gauge how it’s changed over the years. (Short list… they don’t do the shoe as a die cut anymore; the paper icon is now an 8¾ x 4¼ rectangle. Another interesting change; one side is now in Spanish). The icon has a bar code and Jacob, the clerk, scanned it and handed me a receipt as we finished the transaction. At the bottom was an 800-number keyed to a customer satisfaction survey. Dial the number, answer some questions and you’re entered into a drawing for $10,000 between now and the end of September 2007. I don’t know what their response rate is, but the $10,000 amount suggests that it’s pretty low. Taco Bell’s survey gives out $1,000 per week. At a regional seafood restaurant they give me a code that garner...
2 comments
Read more

An Interview with Cause-Related Marketing Pioneer Jerry Welsh

Jerry Welsh is the closest thing cause marketing has to a father. In 1983 after a number of regional cause-related marketing efforts, Welsh, who was then executive vice president of worldwide marketing and communications at American Express looked out his window in lower Manhattan at the Statue of Liberty. The Statue was then undergoing a major refurnishing, and in a flash Welsh determined to undertake the first modern national cause marketing campaign. I say modern because almost 100 years before in January 1885, the Statue of Liberty was sitting around in crates in New York warehouses because the organization building the pedestal ran out of money. And so Joseph Pulitzer, the publisher of the newspaper called The World , proposed a very grassroots solution reminiscent in its own way to Welsh’s cause-related marketing. Pulitzer ran an editorial promising he would print the name of everyone who donated even a penny. Sure enough pennies, along with dimes and nickels, quarters a...
Post a Comment
Read more