NEW BOOK TIME

This week I spent some time to go out and read another book that was outside of my usual circle and that book was The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users by Guy Kawasaki. The general idea of the book was to be a large amount of information on how to maximize your potential use of social media and how every aspect of it can drastically change how your online image is perceived. In my opinion this book tied into the things we are learning in this class as we often talk about how to control the image of our business in order to maximize potential customers and marketing options, but often social media is a more vague field in what to do given how new it is. This book directly aids students in marketing and customer outreach in making people actually want to engage with us and our businesses. If I had to make an exercise around this book for class it would be to create fake Instagram accounts based on several business ideas (ones we're using or not, doesn't really matter), and the goal would be to successfully communicate with people and get them to engage with us as people rather than as a bot or a troll. The learning curve comes in how to build your account in order to convince people that you're a legitimate business, which comes in with the profile picture, the bio, the content on the feed, and how many other accounts you're linked to along with a follower count. For me, the most eye-opening part of the book was when it discussed the nature of how people immediately look at the links on profiles and make assumptions about a business or identity based on it. How clean these links can be stacked, whether or not the sites they lead to are legitimate, etc. It made me realize myself how often I do this when I look at online profiles and am suddenly quick to distrust certain accounts based on this simple observation.