2 Websites and Content Marketing
3 Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The Art and Science of Driving Traffic to Your Website
4 Social Media Marketing: What You Need to Know Before You Start
5 Identity Before Community: Why Most Companies Fail at Social Media Marketing
6 Facebook: King of the Social Media Jungle
7 Twitter: Conversation, Engagement, and Sharing
8 LinkedIn: The Social Media Platform for Professionals
9 The Many Flavors of Social Media
10 Social Advertising: Facebook Ads, Sponsored Tweets, and More
11 Video: A Powerful Social Medium
12 Crafting a Social Media Policy for Your Organization
13 A Final Word on Social Media: Tools for Attracting Even More Business
Burning Questions and Answers: Taking Questions and Dishing Out Answers and Advice
Social Media Marketing Case Studies: Highlighting Real-World Best Practices
Discussion Questions: A Guide to Sparking Engagement on the Topic of Social Media
Index
About the Author
This book has been a group effort. I couldn’t have done it without the entire team at The Marketing Zen Group, and special thanks goes out to Angela von Weber-Hahnsberg and David Kirkpatrick.
This book is just as much theirs as it is mine.
To our clients at The Marketing Zen Group: Thank you for allowing us to be your digital Sherpas. Thank you for your trust, your respect, and your belief in us.
And THANK YOU, DEAR READER! You have shown this book enough love to make it to a 4th edition. I hope you find this edition, too, worthy of your time and attention.
Shama Hyder starts off her book with a scene from The Matrix. I know the scene well. It’s a little bit of philosophy thrown into Hollywood and made simple to consume. Shama’s right for giving us this gem; The Matrix seems to have motivated a lot of us to think differently about how we live online, and how business works.
I know. I wrote about The Matrix a few different times in Trust Agents. We could have just written, “To be a trust agent is to know how to be Neo,” and it would’ve been a shorter book.
There is a Zen to social media. There is a way. Shama’s right about that. And her way—her thoughts, her experiments, her recommendations in this book—is one that can get a lot of people closer to the prize than anything they might intuit and do on their own.
Business rules are different now. Don’t believe me? How are the banks in the United States doing? How are the three big carmakers? How are small businesses doing? You want to keep marketing the way companies have been for the last fifty years? Not a good idea, I’m afraid.
We’re writing new code, and Shama knows it.
There’s human code out there all about how human you can be, how you can connect with people, and what that means for business. I’m flying all over the planet right now writing new versions of this code for companies, showing them how to be human. The goal is simple: explain to people that, while face-to-face is just as important as it ever was, now we’ve got all kinds of new tools that let us tighten bonds in between those in-person moments.
These tools leave a wake of data behind them. Follow these invisible trails of data and you can smell new customers, new opportunities. New networks don’t form inside your inbox. New phone numbers don’t start following you (frankly, that’s probably a good thing). Social media provides the links and connections that allow these networks to form. I’ve taken to calling Twitter the Serendipity Engine, because that’s what it harnesses: serendipity. And you, too, can harness it for your business.
Shama has a way of teaching this new code—her business-savvy Zen approach—that fits the business you’re in, the person you are, and the results you want. I might do a few things differently, but we all might. (After all, if you see Buddha on the road, kill him. Isn’t that the quote?) And you need to consider what parts of her approach you’ll benefit most from implementing. But ignoring her isn’t a good move.
Get into The Zen of Social Media Marketing. Keep a notepad file handy. Write down notes. Seek out everything that makes sense for you. Start setting up some next moves based on what you learn. Shama will show you.
Meanwhile, I’m waiting for the white rabbit.
—Chris Brogan,
coauthor of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal best seller Trust Agents
Why Write This?
When the first edition of The Zen of Social Media Marketing came out in April 2010, I was truly humbled by the amazing response we received. Readers from every walk of life and every corner of the world sent me their stories, their challenges, and their questions. Two years later, I knew the vast world of social media had changed enough to require an updated guide. Although the principles of online marketing and social media remain unchanged, new platforms, opportunities, and tools have emerged that make marketing online more efficient and easier than ever.
Social media is now an integral part of everyday life. Yet many continue to struggle with it.
A while back, I realized the main reason people are struggling with social media marketing: They are going against the natural order of things! The traditional marketing rules cannot be applied to social media because social media is not a marketer’s platform. It belongs to consumers.
For the longest time, marketing consisted of putting out a message about a business or product that was controlled strictly by the business itself. Think about a square peg. The square peg represents the traditional marketing message. Now, imagine square holes. Each hole is a traditional marketing medium—print, radio, and television. The square peg fits the square hole perfectly.
However, here comes social media: multiple online mediums all controlled by the people participating within them—people who are busy having conversations, sharing resources,
