Herding Cats : a Strategic and Timeless Perspective on Harnessing the Power of Social Media

Annotation This book is a concise, insightful, and actionable series of chapters that communicate strategic and timeless fundamentals to help organizations, companies, and brands develop and manage their social media marketing efforts. These fundamentals include defining your purpose and objective based on what your brand or organization stands for, understanding your consumer/customer, developing a content marketing strategy, applying the social media ecosystem perspective, knowing where (through which social channels) to communicate your content, generating consumer insights from online social dialogue, defining key performance indicators (KPIs), and generating relevant analytics that help define your organization's or brand's success against key measures (and not merely reporting raw data). In short, this book is intended to provide the reader (whether an upper-level undergraduate or MBA student, social media manager, or executive) much needed perspectives and frameworks on developing and managing an effective social media strategy. The authors will leverage their extensive industry experience along with much of the current and original research that they are conducting in the field of social media marketing One of the top marketing challenges that marketing managers and executives face today is to better understand social media and its promise as a marketing platform. The social media ecosystem, including traditional platforms such as Facebook and Twitter and upstarts such as Instagram and Snapchat, have evolved significantly over the past 10 years; so much so that keeping pace with the latest social media platforms can seem like herding cats. Inside, the authors provide a timeless perspective on how to create, manage, and measure social media content to help you craft a more strategic approach to your social media efforts. They simplify the concept of branding and advertising (fueled by social media) so you can focus on fostering customer engagement; craft your organization's unique story; tell that story strategically via social media channels; organize, manage, monitor, and measure those efforts; identify key metrics and measure the performance through analytics; and understand the extent of change brought on by digital and social media related to how you engage your customers. Business Expert Press Digital and Social Media Marketing and Advertising Collection Cover 1 Contents 8 Chapter 1: Who Are You and Why Should We Care? 18 Chapter 2: Customer Engagement 28 Chapter 3: It’s Story Time! 38 Chapter 4: Creating Your Content 50 Chapter 5: If Content Is King, Then Distribution Is Queen 60 Chapter 6: Social Media Analytics 74 Chapter 7: Social Media Marketing Best Practices 86 Chapter 8: The New Front Line 98 Notes 106 References 108 Index 112 Ad Page 116 Cover 118 advertising,analytics,branding,brand storytelling,customer engagement,customer relationship management,digital marketing,metrics,social media marketing