If you are interested in getting a jump on using social media for your business or non-profit, I would strongly recommend The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users* by Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick. The authors have put together a book that is part to-do list and part resource guide. This should be your quick start guide. READ MORE ( )

Social Media entered our cultural landscape when I was in medical school. Although I dabbled in Facebook at the time, its birth surpassed me. I have been catching up ever since then.

I have recently switched to Twitter and am happy with that change. I’d like to figure out how to use it, particularly for personal marketing and network, and this book teaches me how to do it better.

Kawasaki and Fitzpatrick are big names in the arena of social media. They’ve experimented with social media platforms extensively and have learned to “game” the system for the purposes of business. They share their wisdom in this book.

Of course, social media is a changing thing. This book was written five years ago, and the algorithms continue to change. Nonetheless, most of their advice still rings true to my experience. This book is packaged into 12 chapters and 123 digestible tips. Each tip is explored in a few paragraphs.

The audience of people who long to have a more expansive social-media presence should read this book. Of course, much of the landscape (and much of the gains) have already went to the early birds. Nonetheless, the new format is with us to stay. ( )

Packed with Content

Guy delivers on the promise in the title. Power tips for Power users. Much to absorb and use for increasing positive visibility of a business or organization. ( )

Guy Kawasaki has been in the forefront of effective promotion of products, services, and one's own skills and talents since his days as the Chief Evangelist for the Apple Macintosh, when personal computers were the exciting new toy and not an appliance we all carry in our pockets. Instead of being left behind by the rapidly changing world of online computing and social media, he has remained a leader, and has become of a great teacher of how to use the same skills and tools for your own benefit. If you have a social media presence--and it's getting harder and harder to function, especially as a working professional or entrepreneur, without one, you want to use these tools effectively.

Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick have between them mastered all the social media tools you'll want to use. This book is a short, clear, practical presentation of what Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google , and Pinterest are good for, and how you can use them. Social media platforms are also, of course, opportunities to make a fool of yourself before a public of a size almost unimaginable for the average person twenty years ago. There are also helpful pointers here on how to avoid doing that. This includes guidance on the ways the different platforms are different. What's acceptable on Facebook isn't what is acceptable on LinkedIn, or Twitter, or Pinterest. Go hashtag-happy on Pinterest, but be more restrained on Twitter, for instance. You'll find guidance on how to present yourself effectively, both to potential future employers and to peers.

I want to emphasize that this book is clear. You won't be left with useful-sounding platitudes but then find when you try to follow them that the specifics you need aren't there. The specifics are here, including visuals where that's helpful.

Highly recommended.

I received a free electronic galley of this book from the publisher via NetGalley. ( )

This is very practical and uncomplicated. I love how he says that you need to always be learning and never think you know it all. ( )

My first book related to Social media. I'd like the way [a:Guy Kawasaki|21269|Guy Kawasaki|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1302632961p2/21269.jpg] and [a:Peg Fitzpatrick|9808550|Peg Fitzpatrick|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1414517795p2/9808550.jpg] explain each and everything with the specifics in easy words. ( )

The team of Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick have mastered social media as well as, or better than, just about anyone. It doesn’t hurt that Kawasaki is a tech marketing legend (Apple, Motorola and the like), but the 123 tips included in "The Art of Social Media" will be useful to anyone who wants to gather a following on the Internet.

This easy read (I think I knocked it out in 3-4 sessions) is less focused on individual services, but the principles shared will help you develop an overall social media strategy. When the Next Big Buzz social platform makes its appearance, you should be able to master it quickly.

This is not to say that you don’t learn a lot about Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, SlideShare, Google+ and Pinterest. You’ll pick up stuff about optimizing posts for each of these platforms, mastering the use of hashtags across services, and trying to understand how each platform adds stuff to your newsfeed.

I co-authored a book on social media ("Build Your Author Platform: The New Rules"), and am happy to say that Kawasaki and Fitzpatrick don’t contradict anything we said there. I’ll also say that I learned things from this book, particularly about Pinterest. You’ll learn new things too, no matter how far along you are in your social media journey. ( )

The Art of Social Media or aka: #ArtofSocial is a comprehensive and pragmatic guide to understanding the ubiquitous beast known as social media, with its numerous tendrils: Twitter, Google+, Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest, etc, etc.
If you are an indie writer, blogger, or someone who wants to learn how to sail the social-media seas, then please get a copy of #ArtofSocial today! ( )

Most of my more focused colleagues (i.e. working only on social media, or self-appointed "experts") will probably reply that it is "trivial", "nothing is really new".

If you have been attending events online and offline around Europe over the last, say, 7 years, you will recognize most of the tips.

Anyway, I still attend way too many events (online and offline), and visit way too many websites (to say nothing about reading proposals for new websites) where most of those tips were simply ignored, that just listing them within the book make it worthwhile reading, as a "pre-flight" checklist (or in-flight rerouting).

It is a short book that could be more aptly described as a "meta-book", as it is actually useful more as a quick practical guide to make up your own "to do" list in managing (or working with those that will manage) your own personal brand.

Moreover, due to its structure, there are chances that, with minor changes related to the high mortality rate of new media and "trendy social networks", the key concepts will survive (i.e. the book is the foundation, but each chapter links to specific blog posts that will be kept up-to-date, a trick that other authors, including myself, use, but most business communication material posted on website doesn't- being "static": a missed opportunity to keep the conversation with your own audience going).

The authors state that prior knowledge and experience of social media is required- but, frankly, while skipping the details, a "digital immigrant" with business experience might understand what is needed- and use the book not as an operational guide, but as a tool to understand if those offering their services as "experts" are offering what (s)he or her/his organization needs.

An additional point (not relevant maybe to you, but to others like me): coming from a cultural/organizational/technological change perspective, I think that it could actually serve as an "induction training guidebook", maybe to be embedded within corporate material and given to participants as a required reading.

Why? Because most of your new employees or collaborators will certainly join your team with some experience in using social media that is closer to what could be named a "Power User" than a "newly hired"- and it is self-delusional to ask them to disappear or assemble a Stasi-like monitoring operation while giving no coaching.

In the future, probably your employees and their personal network will become part of the "outreach" of your company, and therefore it is better to start thinking in constructive terms, the old "win-win": you help them in improving their online presence and visibility (if they want to have one), and you will probably get a smoother transition of communication (including negative communication) between you, your employees, and their and your audience.

Disclosure: I received this book while looking around for material to update my experience-based articles and books series on online+offline social media and communication within politics and business, as I saw an announce via my Linkedin profile http://www.linkedin.com/in/robertolofaro that they were looking for reviewers

The reason why I asked to review this book? Because I bought and read the Kindle edition of his book "APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur-How to Publish a Book" https://www.librarything.com/work/13283256/book/96334401, and it influenced (hopefully improved) my own publication activities with Amazon+Kindle (I added also Slideshare in read-only, but that is another story) ( )

It’s not so much social as business

Guy Kawasaki is a very busy person. He is constantly searching for shareable content, beefing up blog posts, timing tweets and experimenting with online services (especially new ones) that will help him do more with all the above. He recommends using every tool and function social media sites provide, otherwise you will look like an amateur. He says you can (and should) repeat posts, and if people unfollow you, they weren’t right for you anyway. He says if you’re not annoying, you’re not using social media to its fullest.

His book is a super fast, jam packed tour of his social media life. It has more than a hundred links to pages that expand what he writes about (so it’s best to buy the e-book because they’re not spelled out in print). It is a very userfriendly manual.

It is also very singleminded. It recommends you give your life to reposting other people’s findings, written and photographic, and keep up the pace indefinitely. That will give you credibility and followers. It’s basically a business. You brand yourself and constantly hype your presence, without also hyping your talents and accomplishments, goals and desires (That would be crass). Ultimately, it seems enormously shallow, robotic and numbing, as all social media has been criticized as both being and promoting. But not to him.

Kawasaki is as usual, forthright and effervescent. He fears no critics and lives the bold life he recommends. He tells it straight and hard, and you have to take it, because he’s living proof it works. He is that exception we give license to.

Possibly the wisest among the many wise things in The Art of Social Media, is that “social media guru” is any oxymoron, because nobody really knows how social media works, including the authors. What they do is latch onto every platform and work it, and leverage it. What does well they do more of. The most successful tactic (and most oft repeated direction) is to use graphics. Attach them to every post and tweet you can. Make different sizes of them and use them to draw visitors to your blog post, from as many different social sites as you can. Like movie posters. It’s the old: repetition is the soul of advertising, combined with: a picture is worth a thousand words. How could that possibly be wrong? Ever?

If you’re willing to take the full plunge, this is the book for it. If not, you can be amazed at how intricate and involved simple social interaction has become.

David Wineberg ( )