Sterne's "Social Media Metrics" Lacks Insights...You May Wish to Look to Others.

Part of many organizations' Customer Experience strategies are to incorporate Social Media tactics into their plans. So, part of our information gathering involves reading content by the "thought leaders" within this space to glean some tasty Sipping Points to use.

With a glowing endorsement by David Meerman Scott, I felt assured that I would glean great insights into the world of Leading Tools, Strategies and Metrics of Social Media... by reading my first book by social media expert, Jim Sterne.

Sterne has been on the leading edge of "all things Social Media".

However, this book's 9 Chapters only delivered unique, valuable content in Chapter 8: "Getting Buy-In,Convincing Your Colleagues"...The rest of Sterne's material seems like repurposed material from other thought leaders like David Meerman Scott, Steve Krug, the Eisenberg brothers, Halvorson, Jaffe, Kaushik and others.

I was really looking forward to a meaty discussion on best practices in the deployment of Social Media tactics, but this only skimmed at best...I would pass on this "Social Media Metrics" and go with the works of the authors I referenced above.

"Stop thinking "Launch", Start thinking "Lifecycle" for your online communications

Kristina Halvorson

A perfect companion read to Steve Krug's, "Dont Make Me Think" , Kristina Halvorson's, "Content Strategy for the Web", restates the importance of strategic planning for your online efforts and hammers home the point that content is indeed king, but it must be relevant to your target users, and really no one else.

However, we continue to see a mad rush to "launch" a site, without much pre-launch planning, including accountability assignments for who is responsible for content management.

I think the most important take-away here is the @Halvorson statement, "Stop thinking "Launch", Start thinking "Lifecycle".

Halvorson blogs at: http://blog.braintraffic.com/

Do Your Web Visitors "Get It" ?

Steve Krug's @skrug seminal work on web usability is very approachable material on a very important discipline in Integrated Marketing and Communications today.

As the subtitle, "A Common Sense Approach", and Krug's consultancy's name, "Advanced Common Sense" (http://www.sensible.com/) convey, many great design considerations today involve some simple approaches to dramatically improve your web user experiences.

"Don't Make Me Think" is the mantra here. If I cannot figure out what your site is when I land on it...I (your prospect,customer,stakeholder,etc) will move on..Can you say bounce rate? or, No Conversions for You!

Krug also points out the increasing needs for Accessibility and the advantages that CSS sheets provide for web design pros. Many book suggestions and resource links provided as well. Should be a desk reference