3 books to help you use social media to connect with customers

ByElizabeth Harrin Last updated: Books
The Social Media Marketing Book cover

My new book, Social Media for Project Managers, is about using social media and enterprise collaboration tools to work more effectively within an organisation to deliver projects. But what about connecting with customers? Social media is also great for marketing, branding and communication with external groups: customers, government bodies, lobby groups and so on. There may be situations on projects where you need to engage your PR and Marketing teams – and you might need to help them a bit when it comes to a social media effort. Here are 3 resources to get started:

The Social Media Marketing Book by Dan Zarrella (@DanZarrella)

This is a small format paperback which won’t take long to read. It is a good introduction to the different sorts of social media suitable for marketing. It covers blogs, Twitter and microblogging, social networking, media sharing for video and photos, news sites, forums and bookmarking. It also has two good chapters on strategy and how to measure your efforts. All this, plus plenty of graphs and screenshots. This book will help your Marketing people get started and give your project some great external publicity.

Friends with Benefits by Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo

My all-time favourite social media marketing guide, and not just because of the excellent title. It’s clear, easy to read and very practical. This is definitely the one to give your friends in Marketing for Christmas.

The Social Media Survival Guide

The Social Media Survival Guide (2nd Edition) by Sherrie A. Madia and Paul Borgese

This is a beginners guide – with some more detailed information – about how to get started with developing an online presence and good content for your business. The bit in Chapter 12 on podcasting is very good, but the book is let down by some other silly mistakes elsewhere, like saying that hash tags on Twitter can include spaces like ‘#organic food’. This won’t work. They also call the Twitter Fail Whale ‘Failwell’ and confuse the terms blog and post when they talk about blogging. Give it to your Marketing people, but you might want to read it first and highlight the best bits like Chapter 11 on creating socially enabled content.

Have you read any of these?

Elizabeth Harrin wearing a pink scarf

Project manager, author, mentor

Elizabeth Harrin is a Fellow of the Association for Project Management in the UK. She holds degrees from the University of York and Roehampton University, and several project management certifications including APM PMQ. She first took her PRINCE2 Practitioner exam in 2004 and has worked extensively in project delivery for over 20 years.
Elizabeth is also the founder of the Project Management Rebels community, a mentoring group for professionals. She's written several books for project managers including Managing Multiple Projects.