Social Media Marketing Books

For my thesis research I found so far a couple of books quite useful, which I don’t want to keep back:

Dave Evans – Social Media Marketing: An hour a day
He manages to explain the social media phenomenon clearly and provides useful steps to examine the different social media platforms. However, what I would have wished were more hands-on guide on how to finally implement the tools and social media strategy.

Charlene Li ad Josh Bernoff – Groundswell: Winning in a world transformed by social technologies
Both authors provide a very useful overview of various social media strategies and which social media channels can be used for which strategy (e.g. listening to the crowd, responding, energizing etc.)

Larry Weber – Marketing to the social web: How digital customer communities build your business
Although Weber mainly concentrates on online communities, he explains the emergence of the Web 2.0 very clearly.

Other books recommended to me include:

• Paul Gillin - Secrets of social media marketing : how to use online conversations and customer communities to turbo-charge your business
• Paul Gillin - New influencers : a marketer's guide to the new social media
• Tracy Tuten - Advertising 2.0 : social media marketing in a Web 2.0 world
• David M. Scott - New rules of marketing and PR : how to use news releases, blogs, podcasting, viral marketing, & online media to reach buyers directly

Social Media

As can be seen in the video, social media became an increasing trend. I can imagine that many marketers, for instance, recognize the Youtube video posted above. Therefore, the businesses shouldn’t shy away from it. Many companies start using social media activities to listen to customers, engage with customers, and, thus, increase the company’s awareness and customers’ loyalty. To examine this trend, I will use my old blog to post interesting insights of books and academic articles I found during my research for my Master thesis.

I picked this topic, as I think it is not only a fad, but offers new potentials for companies to put themselves in their consumers’ shoes and grow beyond what they have been capable of in the past. Dell, Lego, P&G, Dove or Linux are all good examples for this new potential. Personally, I hope to learn more about social media and the possibilities they offer.