Scott Stratten is a character. His blog and Twitter account are littered with little nuggets of satire about traditional marketing. Through his many stories on his blog, I’ve learned about his disdain for many companies’ traditional marketing practices. This book is no different. It’s the antithesis of a college course in marketing. Which is a big compliment.

Scott firmly believes (as do I) that old school marketing tactics are not only outdated and inefficient, using them often creates a dichotomy within ourselves. As Scott says, “Why market to people the way we hate being marketed to?” Nobody *likes* cold calling. And it’s not effective. So why use it?!

UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging. is a collection of marketing lessons, stories about what not to do, and case studies about effectively using marketing in today’s changing world. It was a quick read – Scott’s conversational and often hilarious writing style make it almost impossible to put down.

The book is filled with practical advice not only about what works in today’s marketing landscape, but also what doesn’t work (like Yellow Pages ads). He talks in-depth about why companies should use social media, and gives great advice about how to do so. He describes the most popular social networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and the strengths and weaknesses of each from a marketer’s perspective.

The stories in the book are a mix of successes and caveats, where marketers can learn from other companies’ mistakes. He really drives home the point that it’s absolutely critical with social media (and with other forms of marketing) how important it is to build a relationship with the customer, listening to them and responding like a human being, and how companies need to live up to the high expectations they set for themselves.

With more than 50 chapters that are somewhat distinct from one another, you can comfortably read a couple chapters a day (or whatever your schedule would allow), or you could do like I did and read the entire book in an evening. The book is filled with sound advice and Scott’s quirky wit (the footnotes are particularly funny), and I’d recommend it to anyone looking for a great read about (un)marketing.

Originally written as an Amazon.com review.

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Whether or not you are active in social media, have a Facebook page or a Twitter account, you should be monitoring the Web for mentions of your company’s name. Virtually all news media is also published online, and people write reviews, blog posts, and comments about brands constantly. By monitoring your brand online, you can be aware of what people are saying about you (or your competitors).

What Should You Monitor?

The first step in monitoring your brand is determining what you want to monitor! It’s a lot like keyword research. There are several areas you may want to consider tracking, including:

• your company name
• key employees’ names
• trademarks you own
• competitor names
• key search engine phrases (phrases you want to rank well for in search engines, such as your product names, web site name, company name, and so on)

Ultimately, what you monitor is up to you. Once you have chosen some key phrases that you want to monitor, you’ll be able to set them up below.

Google Alerts

If you only use one service to monitor your brand online, it should be Google Alerts. Alerts is a free and incredibly easy way to keep track of what key phrases are appearing in search results in Google’s index. Since Google reaches over 80% of Internet users, Google Alerts is the place to start.

Using Google Alerts is incredibly simple… there are just a few fields to enter:

1. Search terms
   These are the phrases that you chose above. You need a google alert for each of them, or you can use Google’s shorthand and put phrases in quotation marks with “OR” between them.
2. Type
   • Everything
   • News
   • Blogs
   • Updates
   • Video
   • Discussions
3. How often
   • Once a day
   • Once a week
4. Email length
   • Up to 20 results
   • Up to 5o results
5. Your Email

For the typical search you can simply enter your search keywords and email address, and leave everything else to default settings.

Twitter Search

Twitter Search is a really effective way to see what people are saying about your company (or your competitors) on Twitter. You can search for a word or phrase, or a Twitter username, and see recent mentions.

With the advanced search, you can also exclude word or phrases, search for hashtags, specific languages, or tweets that reference a specific user or are from or to a specific user. Twitter’s advanced search can also search retweets and tweets with links.

You can subscribe to Twitter’s search results using RSS, which we’ll discuss in more detail below.

Twitter Lists

You might want to keep up with your competition, industry leaders, or industry associations on Twitter, but don’t want to follow them and see all their updates in your regular feed.

Twitter lists let you create groups of users. Lists can be marked private, so the users you follow don’t have to know you’re following them.

RSS

What is RSS?

Several years ago when you wanted to keep up to date with a website’s content, you had to visit the website frequently. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a technology that allows you to subscribe to a website’s content updates.

Similar to an email application, RSS readers allow you to consolidate all your feeds in one place. You can simply open one application or website to view all the updates from the websites you subscribe to.

Google Reader

Google Reader is a free online RSS aggregator. There are also numerous free and paid RSS readers available for every platform and operating system.

How to Monitor Your Brand Using RSS

Many websites have a search function that can be subscribed to via RSS. You can search for your company name or other key phrases, and save the search to your RSS reader and get updates anytime that phrase appears on their website.

Below are several websites that are useful to search for your key phrases and subscribe by RSS:

• Technorati Blog Search
• Twitter Search
• BlogPulse
• BoardReader
• BoardTracker

Backtype

Enter your website’s URL (web address) and BackType will show you who’s been linking to your site on Twitter. It shows a graph with the number of mentions over the past week, a list of top influencers who have shared the address in the past month, and a list of latest tweets mentioning the URL.

You can also compare your website to a competitors’ URL (or compare two competitors).

Darren Rowse, author of ProBlogger the Book and 31 Days to Build a Better Blog and owner of ProBlogger.net knows a thing or two about blogging. When I saw that he’d released another ebook on copywriting, I was anxious to check it out. I think I’m a decent writer, but when I finish a blog post I almost always feel like it could be better — but don’t always know how to improve it.

That’s where the Copywriting Scorecard for Bloggers (affiliate link) comes in. It’s not just another checklist — who would pay $15 for that? The Copywriting Scorecard for Bloggers is a 59-page manual on writing great blog posts. In fact, the actual scorecard only takes up three pages. All in all, there are 63 items on the scorecard. The ebook is divided into four sections, where these items are explained in detail:

• Writing
• Scannability
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Grammatical Errors

Even if you don’t use the scorecard, the ebook is well worth $15. But once you read through once, applying the scorecard to a blog post can help you turn a good blog post into a great one. It can help you improve the SEO, increase its conversion rate, and eliminate embarrassing grammatical errors that erode credibility.

Regular price for The Copywriting Scorecard for Bloggers is $14.97, but as a launch special they’re offering it for only $9.97. I’m sure the price won’t stay there for long, so go grab a copy now.

There are a plethora of books about social media, ranging a 30,000 foot approach (like Chris Brogan’s Trust Agents) to practical how-to guides. That’s where The Zen of Social Media Marketing, by Shama Hyder Kabani fits in. The Zen of Social Media Marketing is a step by step guide to the most popular (and most important) social networking websites for marketing.

Kabani starts off with an introduction to online marketing where she introduces basic marketing concepts such as the ACT methodology (attract, convert, transform). She briefly discusses websites and blogs, and how to optimize them for search engines (a very basic introduction to SEO).

Chapter 3 is where we first start learning about social media marketing. Kabani explains the difference between marketing and social media. Marketing is promoting a product or service to increase sales; social media is a platform where people connect and communicate. They’re both very different, and Kabani explains the differences well. She explains the benefits of social media marketing, and lays some ground rules that will keep an inexperienced marketer from making mistakes in the social media space.

The next three chapters cover Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Kabani walks you through setting up an account, filling in your profile, and using the service. Unfortunately, even with this book being the only four months old, some parts of these three chapters are already out of date. However, it’s a great introduction to the individual websites and there’s a lot of practical advice about using them effectively.

In chapter 7, Kabani covers video and YouTube. Its debatable how social video actually is, but it’s an excellent online marketing strategy and this chapter is a great introduction.

Chapter 8 discusses setting up a social media policy, including who owns the account should an employee leave, what constitutes social media, dealing with confidential information, and who is responsible for updating the social media sites. Kabani briefly touches on monitoring your brand on social media, but could have been expanded on it quite a bit. I feel this is one area where the book is lacking in content.

The book wraps up with several case studies of small businesses that have used social media marketing successfully.

Overall The Zen Of Social Media Marketing is an excellent introduction to social media marketing, and the most popular social media websites. Aside from the lack of detail regarding social media monitoring, I feel the only main drawback to this book is part of its page layout. On each page the content is surrounded by a black border that made it difficult to focus on the actual text.

If you’re looking for a how-to guide for setting up a profile on the main social media sites, and some basic information about using social media for marketing your business, and I definitely recommend you take a look at Shama’s book.

With a title like “Twitter Marketing for Dummies“, I originally thought this book was going to be about outbound marketing. But Kyle Lacy surprised me, and although the book does talk about outbound marketing, he gives equal weight to inbound marketing strategies.

The book starts off with an introduction to Twitter, where Lacy effectively explains what Twitter is, how it works, and how to get started with it. He then goes on to describe the many ways you can use twitter for marketing, customer service, and communication.

In subsequent chapters, he is into intricate detail about setting up a twitter account, finding users to follow, determining what to post, and creating a Twitter marketing plan. there is also an entire chapter dedicated to being productive with your twitter marketing, and the author lists several tools like TweetDeck that can save you a lot of time and help you organize your Twitter posting, following and maintenance.

Lacy goes into measuring the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, something that is often ignored in social media marketing books. I like how he also includes ways to manage your influence and reach, which are a large part of your success with using Twitter.

Overall, “Twitter Marketing for Dummies” is packed with information about using Twitter for your company or organization. The advice applies equally well no matter what purpose you want to use Twitter for, and Lacy even includes an entire chapter on using Twitter for customer service.

If you want to use Twitter in a company or organization and are starting from square-one, I’d recommend you read “Twitter Marketing for Dummies,” available on Amazon.com here.