Social Networking for Business or Pleasure?

I’m sure more than one have wondered if Social Networking websites are really meant for business. One thing is for sure, social networking websites per say were not created for that purpose. Now a even tweeter is used for business. I found this book that explains to you how all of these social websites could be used for personal gain. Not much of the book was really helpful to me, I guess I'm not the entrepreneurial type and in all reality only Marketing majors would be really interested in this type of literature. The list of websites you could use is endless, if you want to make business oversees there's even more to go through. I read about websites that I've never heard of like Squidoo, which the books kind brushes you off on how to set up the account and use more extensively. The book goes through flickr, twitter, facebook, digg, and youtube extensively but not in a very deep way (kind of like on the surface), emphasizing their business powers which I won't try to go through here because I'd just bore you to death. The one thing that I enjoyed was the positive attitude carried throughout the whole book, but then again it is marketing itself.

On the first few of chapters the book focuses on the RESULTS approach, Recommit to marketing, Expect success, Seek partners, Understand your audience, Look for win-win situations, Take strategic action, Stay visible. According to the book this approach will help you get back on the winning horse but of course never forgetting to add social media to the equation. One component that the book pays a lot of attention to understanding your audience and goes as far as saying you have to be able to drop the customers that don't meet your best audience criteria. The next step for “success” is to set up your social media marketing site, the process is pretty much what we did in class with our Facebook pages. The only difference that I found was you have to find your true voice and tell the story of your product/business and share with those interested in it. There are so many social websites that could be used to do business with others. The book explains a wide variety of the ones that the author thinks are the more useful, but for me they are pretty much the same thing and the book goes through them very vaguely, which means more leg work for the people that really want to make use of the book in their personal goals.

I don't think the book is a real tool to become rich and successful no book is but it does give you an understanding of a wide variety of the newest social media websites and it gives you a not very deep idea on how to use them and take advantage of the different tools and characteristics of each one of them. All the websites talked about in the book start out to be free to the user, but the author makes it a point to explain that you have to think about your time as money so the more time you spend the more you're really paying for it.

So, my conclusion is don't buy this book unless you are really computer handicapped and can't figure out how to set up and account and use Facebook or linkedIn or any other website that helps you connect with other people.

 Sources: 30 days for Social Media Success by Gail Z Martin, 2009