The book's good. Really good.
Success Secrets gathers two dozen brief essays by today's darlings of the social media marketing circuit, including Chris Brogan, Brian Clark, Gary Vaynerchuk, Joel Comm, Mari Smith and Denise Wakeman.
The foreword (contributed by Chicken Soup for the Soul creator Mark Hansen) promises readers "will be spoon-fed insights and revelations" on every page. But, being a soup fancier, Hansen doesn't do the book justice. Its pages are so loaded with good stuff, you'll need a knife and fork.
Success Secrets opens with a beefy section devoted to social media marketing "Strategies and Principles." Readers will learn why developing solid content is essential and how to develop it; why transparency is crucial; and how the superstars promote their content and build "mega-followings."
The case study provided by Michael Stelzner alone is worth the price of the book. Stelzner, founder of the popular blog Social Media Examiner, recounts step by step the remarkable viral marketing campaign that launched his firm's high-flying Social Media Marketing Industry Report.
The second half of Success Secrets, "Applications and Websites," walks readers through all the major social media marketing tools: blogs, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Podcasting, Digg and the other social media bookmarking sites, mobile and video. The how-to advice offered is uniformly clear, detailed, sensible and practical.
The book concludes with some smart time-management tips from Dave Evans, author of Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day. Readers who hope to avoid "the dark hole of social banter" that invariably opens when social media marketing efforts aren't organized would do well to consider what Evans has to say.
