Some believe today’s students are savvy social media users who are more trusting of organizations than older users and don’t care for ambiguity. If that’s true, Dan Zarrella’s The Social Media Marketing Book (233 pages) is the perfect gift for the uninitiated trying to make sense out of all the social media options.

Yes, we got a free preview copy, including the press material from publisher O’Reilly. Below we discuss issues of personal brand versus reputation and how they relate to personal branding and building trust, as well as Zarrella’s book.

1. It’s all about make-believe
The press material for Zarrella’s book came with several quotes.

Mr. Kawasaki’s quote insinuates that spending US$ 27 (includes shipping and sales tax) and about three hours reading the book will save me 167 hours of hard labor (if one were to work about 170 hours each month), what we consider a super Return on Investment (ROI).

As any business owner knows, the key question for using social media is what purpose it will serve, so the book should help a manager answer the following questions:

a) What is our social media mission, in what context (e.g., consumer goods vs. manufacturing, large vs. small company)?
b) Which customer(s) could be better served with social media (e.g., are 30 percent or more using it; how)?
c) What does the customer value that we could better provide with the help of social media?
d) What results do we expect from this exercise (i.e. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and SMART objectives)?
e) What is our plan and how can social media help us fulfill it faster?

Spending 170 hours will certainly help accurately answer these questions as far as your business is concerned. This book is a good start. Nevertheless, after spending three hours reading it, I am not convinced it will offset 170 hours of serious research.

Lesson 1: Sometimes things are less about what they are and more about making others believe. The reality check comes after purchase, when you realize that what you bought is not what others made you believe you would get.

2. Keep it simple, Stupid! (KISS), or ‘Where’s the beef?’
Highly respected social media guru Chris Brogan’s comment confused me as well (see right): was it based on Chris’ personal acquaintance with both Dan Zarella and Brad Pitt? Even assuming the quote is true, how relevant is it to the book’s content?

Brian Solis certainly has it right: there are endless options to choose from when it comes to using social media.

Nevertheless, we know that neither Twitter nor Facebook are scalable. Hence, the real clincher for an individual or a small business is to decide which channel to use for the biggest bang for your buck. As Solis puts it, counting down the options without providing much more additional insight does not mean anything quod erat demonstrandum (which is to be demonstrated).

Lesson 2: Social media evangelists or power-users increasingly act as shepherds on the web. In turn, it is hoped that their quotes or first product reviews will get the masses to adopt a product or service. But just because they influence mob-opinion does not make them a trusted brand.

More resources about social media marketing, personal brand and ethics:

Financial Times - Corporate philanthropy inspires trust
Shane Mac says, “Personal brand or personal B.S.?”
Financial Times - When banks abuse customers’ trust

Bottom line
The publicity material we received from O’Reilly starts with:

“Are you looking to take advantage of social media for your business or organization?… Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, this book will help you choose the best – and avoid the worst – of the social web’s unique marketing opportunities.”

This is my response regarding Dan Zarrella’s book and yes, I am aware that nothing I wrote here will be forgotten in the digital age:

Dan Zarella’s book provides the uninitiated with a helpful and quick introduction to the opportunities offered by social media, IF you see things from a US perspective.

As a business person, the book does not tell me how to choose the best social media channel for my products and services. Nor does the author address the five questions listed above that need to be answered before I adopt a new technology as part of my goal-driven business.

Press material received from O’Reilly (2-page download) – you be the judge.

Take-aways
There are some crucial things to remember about social media, quality and personal brands.

1. Reputation is more important than personal brand: Trial lawyers know how important appearances are. Brand is what we want people to believe (i.e. appearances), while reputation is how others see you and your actions over time. To maintain a quality reputation (e.g., Roger Federer) versus representing damaged goods (e.g., Tiger Woods), consumers and industrial buyers want to be sure that your quotes, product reviews and endorsements can be trusted (e.g., if you say it is super-duper, will it be after I have acquired it?).
2. Personal reputation must be protected to hold up over time: In the long run, what matters is what you do while representing your brand. Thanks to digital storage, less is forgotten everyday and past remarks and actions remain part of our future reputation. Whether the final reputational picture put together from digital storage instills trust or shows shallowness is every personal brand advocate’s challenge.

Please, leave a comment! We love to hear your thoughts: how do you feel about these issues regarding personal branding, social media and trust? Here is a chance for anyone with first-hand knowledge (this means you!) to please share your insights.

P.S. – You can get updates on this blog in Twitter by following @ComMetrics. You can also get a free subscription by RSS or:

This post addresses goals 1-4. A follow up post will discuss goals more

If you intend to make money from advertising on your site (e.g., with Google ads) or to sell books, this post will not interest you. If you are blogging for your own pleasure – maybe this is interesting.

However, if you are a chartered accountant, investment counsellor, real estate agent, lawyer or engineer, hang on. This post might just answer some of the questions you have but never dared to ask about social media, blogging and the web.

We have made some general comments about the issues we want to address in this post previously, namely here:

- mission of ComMetrics => helping you succeed

Below we list 4 of the 8 questions you must ask yourself when embarking on a social marketing activity, such as publishing a blog or white paper series online. Without establishing, what you want to achieve it will be that much harder. Read the questions below. Reflect and decide what they mean for you.

Reading on means you can learn from our experiences. If reading this post will help you save a few bucks and hours of work, that much better.

1) What is the purpose of your blog?

This pre-sets the choice and type of success measures that you must use.

The key to answering this question is who your target audience is. If you are writing for your social network or the banker next door, it is surely different from writing for your pals on Facebook or another social network that cropped up last week.

If you intend to improve information security and privacy protection at work, your primary audience may be your employees, customers and possibly suppliers.

Goal 1 => share valuable information with target audience(s) (e.g., get people interested)

2) What are you trying to sell?

Blogging about green technology such as solar collectors is one thing. Very different is the situation, where a real estate professional uses a blog to promote and grow her business. Selling a branded product online (e.g., music track, books, groceries) is surely different than selling investment products and services.

In fact, while people may purchase this week’s groceries online or last week’s top selling novel, they are unlikely to invest in a fund by clicking on a button. So if it is not getting your client to push a button and purchase, what else is it?

Goal 2 => getting on potential customers’ radar screen and keeping in touch with current clients

If you cannot view the above, get clear image here: ComMetrics.com framework for measuring blogging success

3) How can you make your blog’s content valuable to your target audience?

The blue rectangle on the left of the figure above lists some moderators and mediating variables. Think about them before embarking on your marketing campaign. To illustrate the challenge, if your customers are the type of people who are quite busy, successful and/or run their own business, they might not want to visit your website daily. Maybe even once a week is too much to ask. Neither do they want to have 3 stories coming their way via e-mail each day. Who has the time to read all this stuff?

In addition, how informal can you be with your clients or a potential client? You should reflect about this important issue. They might expect you to wear a tie when you meet them the first or second time. Will they appreciate a blog that is being chatty and possible catty?

You decide but unless you find the right language to communicate valuable content, your target audience will not want to hear what you have to say.

If your blog is about information security to raise awareness, it might be easiest to reach your staff by offering content that helps them keep their home PC, iPhone or iPod more secure. In turn, better security hygiene at home will improve things at work for sure.

Goal 3 => Write content that helps your clients or potential clients to work and/or invest smarter

4) How do you want your blog to affect your bottom line?

The above figure illustrates this issue. See the green rectangle on the bottom.

If you are not trying to sell advertising space with your blog, traffic may not be your primary concern. In fact, you may strive to establish yourself as an expert or trusted party with your clients and those possible ones of tomorrow.

Accordingly, increasing your blog’s traffic this week thanks to having gotten on the front page of one of the social bookmarking sites (e.g., del.icio.us), might not be what you are after. Why? Because those individuals may not be your likely customers but very tech savvy surfers that you do not count as your clientele.

So if it is not traffic, what is it? Maybe you want to establish a reputation with people that might result in future business. Else, you may also be interested in keeping in touch with your clients (making sure they know that you are doing great things with their money)

If you write a blog to get much traffic that, in turn, helps you sell advertising with the help of Google, this might be a valuable strategy for some people. However, if you are in a more service-oriented business, thinks might be different. Do you choose your investment, tax or legal adviser on the Web? You may have found information that you thought was interesting on the Web (e.g., ranking lawyers – Avvo.com – imperfect but one way to get info) or reading the person’s blog.

Nevertheless, before you reveal details about your financial, legal or tax situation to that person you may want to have a meeting first.

What about if you want to raise awareness about information security. Maybe your blog is supposed to support your corporation’s efforts to reduce violations of your firm’s privacy violations. Here, you may want to entice your employees to subscribe (see also point 3 above). Thus having huge traffic may be of interest if it also means that most employees read the blog.

Goal 4 => Define how you want the blog to help attain more trust, better reputation and higher brand recognition, or something else with customers or employees.

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Soon we will try to bring you answers to questions 5 through 8. So please, stay tuned.

Also of interest:

8 reasons that speak for having a corporate blog

b – browser usage varies enormously – ignore Firefox at your peril

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