"Now is gone" is a great resource for PR, Marketing & some Web Developers

I've finally found the time to finish reading "Now is Gone", and I'm impressed.

The book is aimed at traditional Marketing and PR executives with an important message about how the communications paradigms have changed and they are now faced with an "evolve or die" situation.

The seven social media principles as outlined in the book are:

1. Relinquish message control
2. Honesty, ethics and transparencies are musts
3. Participation within the community is marketing
4. Communication to audiences is an outdated, 20th century concept
5. Build value for the community
6. Inspire your community with real, exciting information
7. Intelligently manage the media form to build a stronger, more loyal community

The people formerly known as the audience are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable.

- Jay Rosen

I'm not going to go into any depth on what each of these mean (buy the book to find out) but the one point that was really drummed home is that effective marketing will require companies to be active participants in social media communities - all of the time, not just when they have a message to deliver. I can see the role of "community manager" becoming much more commonplace in PR companies as the online population will happily interact with a human being but are far more skeptical of a faceless corporation or brand.

The only downside with the book is that it seemed, in places to become a little repetitive, this isn't a huge problem as the book is not massively long. I know from experience that it can take a few tries to get a new idea to register with a senior executive.

From the point of view of a developer working for a marketing company, the book has clarified a lot of points of which I was vaguely aware and also armed me with enough material to support any suggestions that I might want to make. It has also given me plenty of ideas on how to tailor web applications to best serve social media marketing efforts. I feel that through the book I've gained an important insight into both the aims and needs of Marketing & PR people on the web and also a few things about social network dynamics which had never occurred to me before.

I'd recommend this book to anybody involved in any part of an online marketing operation or project, it's almost worth the asking price just for the extensive list of sources at the end of each chapter and the Blogroll at the end of the book. Again, thanks to Social Media Today for sending me a free copy.

Labels: Review