The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users
Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick
Portfolio/Penguin Group (2014)

How and why mastery of the art and science of social media can rock the world

Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick have written a book in which they use and thereby demonstrate all of the “tips, tricks, and insights” that have enabled them and their clients to “rock social media.” This is a knowledge transfer that can be of incalculable value to those whose objective is to use social media to achieve business objectives for themselves and/or an organization.

There are twelve chapters in which they explain HOW TO (as well as HOW NOT TO), accompanied by tips:

1 Optimize Your Profile: You have only a few seconds to make a favorable impression
2 Feed the Content Master: Figure out how to make money, whom to attract to do that, and what they want to read
3 Perfect Your Posts: Be valuable, interesting, brief, thankful, visual, and organized
4 Respond to Comments: Assume people are good until proven bad
5 Integrate Social Media: Be your curator and entice people to follow you with what they want, not with what you want them to experience
6 Get More Followers: Be exquisite rather than popular, loved rather than famous, palpable and unmistakable rather than predictable
7 Socialize Events: Integrate the hashtag into everything
8 Run Google+ Hangouts on Air: Get the right equipment (i.e. webcam, microphone and earphones, lighting and background)
9 Rock a Twitter Cat: Prepare your guests (e.g. be audience-driven, stay Q&A-centered, and draft in advance)
10 Avoid Looking Clueless: Don’t ask people to reshare your posts
11 Optimize for Individual Platforms: For Facebook, grok EdgeRank, use its Page Insights, embed videos, and interact with other Facebook pages
12 Put Everything Together: Kawasaki and Fitzpatrick provide a case study using a non-fiction book launch as an example

Obviously, it would be a fool’s errand for anyone who reads this book to try to apply all of the more than one hundred “tips, tricks, and insights” that are provided. The Art of Social Media can serve as both a reality check and an operations manual for those now planning to become actively involved with social media or have only recently done so. I think it can also be very helpful to those whose involvement has thus far made little (if any) progress.

The material provided was acquired through experimentation and diligence, not pontification, sophistry, and conference attendance.” In other words, Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick learned by doing. That may well be the most valuable insight in their book.