Engage!: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web

Solis really emphasizes the idea of companies acting like human beings and having a solid plan. This is a huge aspect of social media marketing. If companies can use social media to interact with and learn about their customers, they can learn so much. The best way to do this is by having conversations with them. Solis explained all of this, throughout the book, in a well written way that was easy to understand. Solis not only tells the reader how to do something, but why they should be doing it. "Engage!" would be a great asset for any company looking to increase their involvement in social media and improve their customer relations. "Engage!" is set up almost like a textbook, albeit an interesting textbook, that is jam-packed with valuable information.Solis set up about half of "Engage!" as if it were a college course, which was extremely effective. These sections, titled "The New Media University," detailed the steps a company can take in order to use social media to their advantage. For those people who have some experience in social media, this section can act as a refresher, but for those people who are relatively new, this section can act as a detailed introduction.This book is best suited for people with some background knowledge of social media. While the beginning of the book does a nice job outlining how and why a company should use social media, the latter part of "Engage!" delves into slightly more advanced metrics and programs. Therefore, some knowledge of social media analytics would be beneficial before reading. The glossary at the back of the book is helpful for a refresher on some terms that may be a bit unfamiliar and the companion website, [...], helps to bridge the gap between publish date and any updates to social media.

I wavered between a 2 or 3 star review for this, but I do feel like there's some good information here so I erred on the side of positivity. Here's the thing though:Somewhere around the halfway point there's not much point in doing anything more than skimming the rest. The book starts off as kind of inspiring to be honest. We are agents of change, at the forefront of a communication paradigm shift, etc etc. The author has also spearheaded many creative and interesting online engagement campaigns for huge corporations like Budweiser. They are interesting and educational to hear about, though more nuts and bolts of how they were conceived would've been invaluable.The problem is we don't hear enough about applying this kind of stuff, just a lot of empty platitudes most of the time. There's a very smart social media mind behind this book, but illustrating his methods on paper for others to learn from is not his strong suit. A lot of the info runs together (at least it seems to) and you realize pretty quickly that the book is padded to death. Some of the diagrams are ridiculous and incomprehensible. If you think I could actually connect 75-100 points of data on a chart (that looks like a two year old's drawing) and convince my boss that it makes sense and that we need a bigger social media presence, you could be convinced of a lot of things.It's not a terrible book, but it's kind of like when a world class athlete goes into coaching and fails miserably. They're naturally good at something but can't communicate to others how to apply their methods.PS: I was assigned this for a class as well and would suggest a chapter here and there at most. This kind of wishy washy content that's not applicable in the real world is what's wrong with contemporary academia.

"Perhaps the biggest mistakes committed by businesses, personalities, and brands in social media occur when people jump into social networks blindly without establishing guidelines, a plan of action, a sense of what people are seeking and how and why they communicated, an understanding of where people are congregating, a definition of what they represent and how they will personify the brand online, and the goals, objectives, and metrics associated with participation." Albeit fairly late in the book, this sentence sums up the purpose of Brian Solis in Engage! One more book about Social Media, sure; but this one is one of the best written. It's almost reassuring to read sentences that exceed 140 characters (or twenty words), and, while you can find all the trendy buzzwords and expressions on virtually every page, the author authentically tries to assist social media managers as they transition from the broadcasting age to the intricacies of a new form of netcasting architecture where both users and corporations exchange "social objects." How well or efficiently can they do so? This book provides social media managers with the background knowledge and practical notions that they can leverage to design a consistent strategy.The first half of the book surveys the world of social media in general, describing all the aspects of social interactions and their impact on corporate marketing and communication, as well as customer service departments. Traditional marketing schemas have irreversibly imploded under the pressure of a crowd represented in a "conversation prism" that factors in behavioral guidelines implicitly or explicitly set by the multiple socialization channels. So marketers must listen. What can they do with so much information? "Instead of inhibiting the pace and breadth of information flow, we must channel relevant details and data," a task that does not only require "attention" (nice reference to Linda Stone's Continuous Partial Attention), but also some understanding of applied social sciences or researchers' and analysts' categorizations (such as Charlene Li's and Jeremiah Owyang's Socialgraphics). Achieving a state of the art "unmarketing" to use a time-stamped word by Scott Stratten - i.e. rebuilding a marketing strategy from the bottom up - entails, for many companies, a serious reassessment of some entrenched marketing habits. Hence the resolutely didactic approach of the two parts of the book: "The New Reality of Marketing and Creating Customer Service" and "Forever Students of New Media."The second half of the book comprises four parts that detail the new responsibilities that come up with the potential of social media, and focuses more specifically on what a "new marketing" approach may look like. One of the most remarkable sections is related to "defining the rules of engagement." It unambiguously shows to the skeptics that the social media revolution is not a passing phenomenon spurred on or controlled by influencers, but the reality of today's computing, one of the incarnations of the social Web, and that it is set to transform every single company from the inside. The examples of IBM's and Intel's guide-lines (and its digital IQ Program) do not only demonstrate the forward-thinking intelligence of people like Bryan Rhoads or Ken Kaplan, but also the proactive approach of highly regarded companies as they define new roles and responsibilities to adapt to a new world. Digital intelligence is not simply the prerogative of a handful of gurus appointed to task forces or advisory boards, it will also be part of the job description of most employees in the close future if they want to be up to par with educated customers. The scope of the book stops here, but it's clear that the social media revolution will lead to the reassessment of corporate cultures, employee empowerment methodologies, and linguistic and artistic skills. "Unmarketing" just like any vibrant "marketing" starts from within. Corporate stonewalling doesn't have too much future.End result: a serious book that gathers the Zeitgeist (and will bring many people up to speed with trends and idioms). Somewhat voluble, yet kindly extroverted and definitely useful if you want to create a social media plan.

I’m not going to lie – Brian Solis let me down. He’s a well-respected social media marketer, and I’d heard good things about his book, but I just can’t bring myself to rate it as highly as the books that were released by some of his contemporaries.The sad fact is that Engage! has aged much more than many other social media marketing books, perhaps because Solis placed too much importance on specific social networks – sure, he does agree that the message is more important than the medium, and some of his lessons in planning and deployment are well worth reading, but his work makes for tedious reading and, to be honest, he doesn’t say anything which hasn’t been said before.And that’s not to mention the typos – there are a shocking amount of mistakes scattered throughout the pages, more than you see in some self-published works. If you’re the sort of person who isn’t bothered by that then it might not be such a problem, but each time I spotted one it stopped me in my tracks.In all honesty, though, it’s still a good book – it just pales in comparison to some of the other social media marketing books that are out there, some of which were written earlier and yet have stood up to the test of time. There are lessons to be learned and diagrams to be studied, but you’ll find nothing here that you can’t find online or written about elsewhere, with more aplomb.Which is a shame, because Solis is a highly competent marketer and a great thinker and doer – he’s just more of a marketer than a writer, and that’s okay. Either way, good marketers seek inspiration everywhere, and when you’ve read everything else you can find then you should read this too.

ok

I have just red this book and I found it very interesting, and i would like to advice it to people looking to engage.The only point i didnt like on the book was the fact that the images, that are so important in understand some topics, are in black and white and some of them are not so clear.Besides that everything is great.

Boring.