Not to be part of the social media revolution is to miss out. Jon Reed really gets it and shows you how to join in.
Suzanne Moore, Columnist, The Guardian
Packed with practical, no-nonsense insight that allows you not only to keep up but to get ahead.
Justin Cooke, CEO, POSSIBLE and Chair, British Interactive Media Association
Should be on the desk of anyone wanting to make a success of their online presence.
Claudio Concha, Head of Digital Media, Big Lottery Fund
If you want to use social media to build your business, [this] straightforward guide will help you figure out where to start.
Suzanne Kavanagh, Director of Marketing and Membership Services, ALPSP
If you only read one book on online marketing, I implore you to make sure that it is this one. If you implement the strategies and tips you pick up, you will have a winning recipe for success. I know this for a fact because I have done just that and it has worked for us.
Claire Georghiades, Accounts Resource Ltd, Amazon review, 27 Nov 13
A book that both builds confidence and helps you choose where to concentrate your efforts… An excellent, practical (and fun) guide to using social media to reach your markets while keeping your overall business objectives in mind.
Mafunyane, Amazon review, 28 Oct 13
Amazon Reviews of the second edition
An invaluable book for small business!
By Claire Georghiades at Amazon.co.uk, 27 Nov 2013
When I reviewed the first edition “Get Up To Speed With Online Marketing” by Jon Reed, and wrote “An invaluable book for small business,” I didn’t realise what a huge impact it would have on our own business. And guess what, with this new edition, the book just got better. As the first edition, it manages to be a really good read AND is packed full of relevant and up to date information.
If you only read one book on online marketing, I implore you to make sure that it is this one. If you implement the strategies and tips you pick up, you will have a winning recipe for success. I know this for a fact because I have done just that and it has worked for us. And we are a firm of accountants, which is not an easy business to market online. We started our business from scratch in January 2012, and now have nearly 20K twitter followers, a successful blog, and a Richmond Business Award for Best Website in 2013. Not only that, well over 50% of our customers find us online, most of whom are local. And all of that achieved on a very small budget, largely with the help of this book. So I am certain that if the possibilities explained in this book can work for us, they can work for any business.
Before I read the book, I was an absolute beginner, using Facebook for fun and occasionally logging in to LinkedIn. And plenty of the terms relating to online marketing and social media in this book were completely new to me. At the time, I half believed that social media was a modern time waster.
Jon Reed turned this all on its head his simple philosophy. Set objectives, use online marketing tools and measure the results! It sounds simple, but there are so many examples of businesses that have not succeeded as much as they hoped at online marketing, it is clear it is not easy. Luckily Jon Reed gets you started, generously sharing his huge bank of knowledge and taking you on an exciting journey with easy to follow exercises. His enthusiasm is infectious, and he simply `gets it’, understanding not only the whole maze of social media, but also what the reader needs to know to be able to use it and exactly the best way to explain it all.
Read this book, refer to it, sign up for the 5 day online marketing plan, but most important of all, implement what you read. I would thoroughly recommend “Get Up To Speed.” A must read for anyone who wants to get up to speed with online marketing!
Read this review at Amazon.co.uk…
An accessibly-presented, business-focused, practical (and fun) guide to connecting with customers via social media
By Mafunyane on Amazon.co.uk, 28 Oct 2013
The latest edition of Jon Reed’s accessible and practical book Get up to Speed with Online Marketing has all the strengths of the first version and more. When I reviewed the initial publication three years ago, I highlighted the book’s emphasis on the use of third party tools, such as applications, plugins and widgets that help non-technical folk get quick results without the need to brief and pay designers or developers. Writing back then I said, “Of course you could find all these online tools yourself if you had sufficient time. What Get Up to Speed… does really well, though, is help you know what does what and what’s worth spending the time and effort to implement. Some of the best ‘takeaway’ points from the book are simple, but it’s unlikely you would stumble across them unless you’d tried all these things out yourself.” All this useful information, along with constant reminders to focus on your overall goals and measure the impact of your decisions, results in a book that both builds confidence and helps you choose where to concentrate your efforts.
What has changed since the first edition is the place of social media and online marketing within the business world. In the first edition, Reed takes time to persuade us that it’s worth investing in what he calls “the new marketing” in the first place. Now, we’re told, “social media is the mainstream”, a view I certainly share – which makes this book even more of an essential tool for any marketer, and especially for anyone who’s struggling to promote their own small business while also juggling all the other demands on their time.
It may be the norm to use social media now, but the challenge for overstretched and under-budgeted marketers isn’t just about how to create websites, write blogs and set up social media profiles. The key marketing issues Reed focuses on are the need to be findable (in places where your customers already are) and how to build relationships with customers and contacts. There’s no doubt Reed (whose Publishing Talk community has over 280,000 followers on twitter) knows a thing or two about connecting with people. But readers also benefit from the accessible way in which he shares all his knowledge. The real-life case studies he reports on, the checklists and summaries he includes and the links to all those third-party tools make it extremely easy for anyone to see which social media tools they can use to do this, and what steps they should take to achieve their goals. A new `best practice’ feature at the end of each chapter provides a handy reference for how to handle each featured approach, a glossary helps you sort your `wireframes’, `pingbacks’ and `hangouts’ from your `CMS’, and regular FAQs (again, new to this edition) anticipate some of the key issues people are likely to find difficult.
Reed’s also in touch with the latest trends. For this version of the book he’s dropped the chapters on virtual worlds (a cool development, but not something most people will actually use to promote their business) and social bookmarking in favour of covering Google+ and “one of the biggest social media sensations in recent years” (the visually-based Pinterest). He also features mobile platforms such as Instagram and Twitter’s video service Vine. Never fear, though, if you still want the old stuff you can download the lost chapters from the book’s website.
As with the last edition, it’s the practical tips and “quick wins” that are likely to prove the most useful. Whether it’s setting up a hashtag contest (where you ask users to share images or ideas via a specific platform and keyword) to generate a buzz, using a social media client such as HootSuite to manage your workload or geotagging online images to gently promote your location, even the most social-media savvy reader is likely to learn a thing or two from these. And if all that sounds too much like hard work, Reed is keen to make it fun. On the final page, he exhorts you to “focus on what you enjoy, what you do best, and where you can add the greatest value to your business”. Overall, then Get up to Speed… remains an excellent, practical (and fun) guide to using social media to reach your markets while keeping your overall business objectives in mind.
Read this review at Amazon.co.uk…
