When you work in social media regularly, one of the best things to have on hand is a book that you can hand to business owners that don’t recognize the benefits of social media. One of my favorites Eric Harr’s recent book entitled The Real Truth About Social Media.
Despite it’s modest size (about 100 pages), Real Truth is filled with actionable insights that are easily understood by traditional marketing executives and business leaders, without time-wasting jabber or hollow social media evangelism. Real Truth answers the most common question that business leaders have about social media: Why bother?It’s not about social media. It’s about customer service.
“If you deliver old-school customer service to your customers — if you care, listen, and have humility, and if you put people first — you will reap rich rewards from social media. You will build a volunteer army of passion-driven, newly-empowered marketers,” Harr said. “The brands that are winning in social media do it old-school.”
And he’s right. The most successful companies with social media are the ones that have put the greatest effort into customer service — and knowing their customer. Social media is just a method of reaping and measuring the rewards of doing so more quickly.
The book demonstrates to business owners how the balance of the business-customer relationship has changed — making it more important than ever for business owners to leverage the law of reciprocity by providing the highest level of customer service possible. Harr includes ‘actionable insights’ throughout Real Truth that help business owners test social media by putting simple tactics in action. For example, he suggests that join the Twitterati by joining Twitter and putting four simple rules into action: 1) spend more time retweeting than tweeting; 2) Tweet about things that matter to you; 3) focus on getting others to talk (see #2 for topics); and 4) Have fun.
The book provides one of the best summaries on social media metrics that I’ve read. Instead of measuring your success on Twitter by counting the number of followers, Harr suggests monitoring more meaningful metrics: How far your Tweets reach; How often your tweets are shared; How influential people who retweet your messages are (based on their Klout score); and the click-thru rate on content that you share.
Real Truth is a good read that resonates with business owners and social media evangelists alike.
We don’t talk anymore
Recommended by Harr, “The Break-up” The Break-Up’ is a classic YouTube video about the relationship between an advertiser and a consumer. Enjoy!
About Troy Janisch