Reading Reflection No. 2

Reading Reflection #2: The Art of Social Media

1) What was the general theme or argument of the book?

The main premise of this book describes ways in which to leverage social media as a marketing and branding tool for yourself and your organization.  Like you may expect with any book about social media you may already know some, or most, of what is in it. The thing is the book is written by two people with a large amount of experience in the social media branding game.  There are little details that you probably don't know, or haven't thought of discussed in this book.  For me, some of these little details were game changing.  That is pretty much what this book is about, those little details.

2) How did the book, in your opinion, connect with and enhance what you are learning in ENT 3003?

A lot of what we talk about, and do, in this class is focused on our interactions with others.  Social media gives us a way to connect with people we may not otherwise connect with due to geography and time.  This book provides good advice on how to project an image that others wish to engage in.  Whether the entrepreneur is seeking funding, advice, market assessment or other information social media is place where all of those interactions have the possibility of happening.

3) If you had to design an exercise for this class, based on the book you read, what would that exercise involve?

Based on the subject matter of the book the exercise would probably focus on curating your social media presence.  One major emphasis of the book is to keep your branding consistent across all media platforms.  One exercise may be to look at organizational branding across social media, and other mediums, and try to identify firms that stray from this ideology.  When one is found have the student determine if this lack of constancy may be intentional, and if so, why does it work/not work.  

4) What was your biggest surprise or 'aha' moment when reading the book? In other words, what did you learn that differed most from your expectations?

One great part of the book focuses on "feeding the content monster".  I will do my best to sum up the chapter, but, if you plan on doing anything where you will be touching social media for an organization PLEASE read this chapter.  The section, for the most part, describes the process of placing content on social media.  It goes into great detail how to utilize rss feeds, and other news sources, to increase page views.  Social media is the same as any other website or commercial, it is all about traffic, traffic, traffic.  This chapter does a great job of explaining how to cultivate traffic for your social media pages.  I am glad I am doing this homework because I got to reread that chapter, can not recommend it enough.

And just because we do video recordings in this class I will leave you advice from the page I randomly just opened to...

Wear solid colors when doing anything related to video.  This is something I know, however, it cannot be stressed enough.  If you are going to do something on video (blog, meeting, instructional, etc) please wear solid colors.  Video will strange things to your striped clothes (appear to move, change color, all sorts of other things.)  I used to help record Mediasite courses for a college here at UF.  This was always in bold lettering with a lot of exclamation points.

That is what this book is a long list, and explanation, of how to conduct yourself successfully using social media.