By Kyle Fiehler
Despite the implication in the book’s title, that it focuses solely on social media, The B2B Social Media Book is really a book about inbound marketing strategy. Its authors cover everything from the evolution of search and keyword strategy, to business blogging and why there is absolutely, no way in hell you shouldn’t be doing it.
Anyone seeking a primer on why content generation matters, how it increases visibility and drives traffic to your site and yes, how social media achieves these ends, would do well to read this joint effort of the social media sages Kipp Bodnar and Jeffrey Cohen.
The subtitle of the book, “Become a Marketing Superstar,” is a metaphor the authors return to throughout the book. At times, it has the effect of making the reader feel like a kindergartener striving for a sticker. But the overall strategies for reaching that level of “superstardom” are worth paying attention to.
Take Bodnar and Cohen’s formula for determining the ROI of a B2B social marketing effort, for instance. It goes something like this,
[Total Lifetime Value – Cost of Customer Acquisition (COCA)]/ COCA= ROI
Here the COCA includes all the associated costs of social media efforts, from an employee’s salary over the time spent on a given social media task, to overhead costs such as maintaining a blog or paying a designer to spruce up the post.
This formula allows marketers a way to justify the investment of time and money in social media, proving to the higher-ups that we’re not simply tweeting pictures of cute puppies and casually perusing Facebook. Concrete strategies like this one make the cutesy language (“Math not hugs”), and excessive use of the exclamation point easier to take.
As the authors mention in the introduction, the book is actionable, with each chapter accompanied by exercises to complete as you read. The B2B Social Media Book is filled with useful tools and advice, like the equation above, for maximizing the impact of social media efforts. These are ultimately what make the book a worthwhile read, rather than the motivational-speaker sort of reassurances that you can one day be a marketing superstar too!!!
