Connect

Connect! Marketing in the social media era is a compilation of essays from 100 marketers and social media experts, each with an allocation of 400 words to write about, yes you guessed it, marketing and social media. Assembled by Jim Caswell, all profits go to support Susan G. Komen for the Cure (breast cancer). Actually, i recieved the book as a gift from my talented blogger friend Peter Korchnak who blogs on Sustainable Marketing, and a contributor to Connect!. his review of the book can be read here. So whilst this post is a slight departure from my established reporting theme, i consider it worthwhile and a modest contribution to help raise awareness for an inspired project and a worthy cause.

A few highlights from the 100 contributions:

A piece I particularly likes is by Martin Ouellette and is entitled Marketing with social norms in mind. He maintains that social norms and marketing norms are different. He ends up by saying "We can't force market norms in social media. It just doesnt work. To each space, it's rules. So when advertisers communicate and act with empathy, generosity and reciprocity we have social media that accepts brands and products". I thought that was quite neat.

Jay Berkowitz (www.tengoldenrules.com) does a pretty good job too of outlining the ten things that work in media marketing srategies for businesses. These include social networking, micro selling , RSS, video such as Youtube, online communities , blogs, Twitter (what a surprise!) , revenue earning blogs with Adsense, MySpace, answering questions on Linked in, web optimised PR, and getting included in ratings and reviews. Answering questions on Linkedin ? hmmmm? Does that sell ? Amazing.

My blogosphere friend Michael Mossoba also contributed a piece called "An Essay on Storytelling in Twitter Format. " He says its all about stories. "Remember that a great story is remembered forever" . Once upon a time .......

Dave Rigotti tells us that 120,000 new weblogs are created every day.

Nathan Beck 's piece called The Power of Simplicity is a review of the exponential growth and impact of that T thing again i.e. "harnessing the power of simplicity presented by Twitter". Nathan says: "Are 140 characters enough to make a point? I think so". Funny. I didnt see him giving up any of his 400 words to make his point . Ha.Ha.

And the best page in the book is a Twitterish entry in large font which goes like this:
@Sanitra Social media makes the world a little bit smaller & marketing’s world larger

Anyway, a great book, an inspired idea, a wealth of insights, a century of experts and worthy venture. I recommend you get your copy. And what's more, you can gorge on your daily Chunky Monkey while reading it.

elaine cohen is the joint CEO of BeyondBusiness, a leading reporting and social-environmental consulting firm based in Israel. Visit our website at: www.b-yond.biz/en