Social Media book to be published by Bookshaker… with a little help from Vodafone

Well, here’s some excellent news.

A few weeks ago I wrote an eBook to help businesses understand what social media can do to help them market themselves and increase their traffic. It was a takeaway product for The Funky Agency, the social media and marketing agency, where we help clients plan their marketing and PR, create and set up SM and webbies (whether that’s membership sites, intranets or traditional websites with plug ins and clever stuffage – our Sal is a marvel who make code sit up and turn somersaults), and most importantly, micro manage and depth mine their social media…

Well, let’s face it, it’s so bloomin’ time consuming to create interesting, remarkable and fresh daily content and twit, FB, linkit, flickr, dig, stumble and delicious it every day (five profiles being the least you can get away with really, at an hour a day per profile, every day – well you do the maths), let alone create products such as white papers, eBooks, webinars, podcasts, video, and then link it back into the traditional and online PR and marketing campaigns, that most companies are quailing – and often failing. Which is where we step in.

Called ‘WTF Can Social Media do for your Business’ it has already proved a great hit with our visitors and their networks and…cue trumpet fanfare!… I have just been signed up by Bookshaker (Lean Marketing Press) to write a full-length version for publication in eBook, Kindle and paperback.

The new extended edition will include drill down tips and guidelines for businesses using the main social media sites, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Squidoo, MySpace, smaller and more niche sites, and Bookmarking sites, such as Delicious, Stumbleupon and Digg. It will also include tips on setting up and running a blog for maximum leverage and brand exposure and how it all ties in and interacts with online and traditional PR and marketing. Basically it’s a brain dump – but a beautifully written and edited one, obviously!

Lean Marketing Press have a history of being innovators, with ‘Dangerous Debs‘, one of their two founders, being very active in internet marketing, well, since forever.

This bodes well for ‘WTF Can Social Media Do For Your Business’, as Lean Marketing Press are just about to publish ‘Ping: How To Tap Into The Power of Traditional & Social Media To Massively Improve Your Profile & Profits (Alan Stevens) so ‘WTF Can Social Media Do For Your Business’ will join their social media and internet marketing stable along with ‘Do Your Own PR: The A-Z of Growing Your Business Through The Press, Networking & Social Media’ (Paula Gardner) and ‘MediaMasters: Insider Secrets from the big names of broadcast, print and social media’ (Alan Stevens & Jeremy Nichols)

In addition, Lean Marketing Press’s marketing is much better focused than any other publisher I know, and this coupled with The Funky Agency’s comprehensive social media skills and tools (NB by applying these to ourselves thefunkyagency.com gained an Alexa ranking of 9.02% in less than three weeks from a standing start and without even appearing in Google – trust me, if you didn’t get that, it’s a WOW), could mean that, to rip off a fairly well known advertising campaign slogan, it may very well reach areas other books fail to reach… And quickly!

Which is all fabulous and enough for me to break out the champagne (you know its my favourite…), but in the mean time I actually have to rewrite the thing and take it from it’s current modest 6,000 words up to a lovely chewy 40,000 words or so. Now that wouldn’t normally be a problem, I mean writing is pretty much an automatic response for me, somewhere up on a level with driving and cooking, and this is easy peasy stuff I know backwards, forwards and sideways. But you know there’s a BUT coming, and that BUT is TIME.

Because I am currently helping Cision promote and market their brand and very desirable CisionPoint platform (yum, I want one to keep!) and that, dear reader, involves leaving my home office three times a week, swapping jeans and socks for smart clothes and heels, and re-entering, after a 10 year gap, the wonderful world of commuting.

It was, to put it mildly, a bit of a shock the first day, but I quickly slipped back in the swing, and the only real hassle is, or rather was, the disruption to work time because of the travelling – you just get so much more achieved when you work from home – well you do if you are focused anyway! Dealing with email on your smartphone is one thing; updating social media for clients and/or writing a book is something else entirely! Luckily the lovely people at Vodafone have stepped in to help me out and we are now partnering together to roadtest their new Vodafone sim-enabled Samsung NC110 with built in broadband.

It’s a bit gorgeous really. Black and sleek and terribly glamorous, if I’m honest. Lightweight and so flipping easy with its built in broadband and longlife battery – no dongle, no brick in my bag, no plug in cables to lug about or trip over. In fact I think I may be in love. As is everyone else, it would seem. The very first day I whipped it out on the fast train to Paddington, my (male) neighbour said without any prompting “I love your netbook by the way, it’s really nice.” Mmmm, isn’t it?

And not to mention incredibly useful… synopsis done, and the depth-mining social media guides are coming along nicely. Watch this space!