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Small Business Smarts
Book

Small Business Smarts

Building Buzz with Social Media

Steve O'Leary, Kim Sheehan and Sterling Lentz
Praeger, 2011
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Recommendation

Many entrepreneurs regard social media as a great free asset with upside potential but discover that maintaining an effective online presence requires time and effort and may show no results. Marketing experts Steve O’Leary, Kim Sheehan and Sterling Lentz share the experiences of small-business owners and demonstrate how to form online social communities that promote business and recruit and retain customers. If this is the first text you’ve ever read on social media, you will discover a treasure trove of tips. However, the book covers much of the same ground as earlier guides to the topic. getAbstract recommends this clear road map to social media novices (or laggards), who will appreciate its step-by-step instructions for building an audience.

Summary

Defining Social Media

Social media enable and encourage interactive dialogue between companies and their customers through blogs and microblogs, social networking sites, multimedia sites, review and opinion websites, and geosocial networks.

The most popular business sites include Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Multimedia sites – such as Flickr, Picasa, YouTube and Vimeo – allow users to share photographs and video content. You can rate products, services and businesses online through review and opinion websites such as Yelp and Insider Pages. Because consumers use geosocial networks to show their whereabouts, businesses can reward customers who “check in” at their location. Geosocial networks include Foursquare and Gowalla. Users frequently link their geosocial networks to their social networks.

Blogs may display personal online diaries, commentaries or news reports on specialized subjects. WordPress and Blogger are popular blogging websites. Microblogs are shorter blogs, generally limited to 300 characters. Twitter is the most popular microblog website.

“Online Listening”

Social media expand your ability to reach customers and allow you to listen...

About the Authors

Steve O’Leary is the chairman of O’Leary and Partners, an ad agency. He and Kim Sheehan co-wrote two other small-business marketing books and work on a small-business website, Grabbing Green. Sterling Lentz is lead project manager at Adpearance, an online marketing agency.

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