Reviewed from Uncorrected Proof

Friends with Benefits
A Social Media Marketing Handbook by Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo is coming out this November. Just in time for my birthday.

Lucky for me, their book publisher, No Starch Press, understands geek entertainment and they sent me an advance PDF. Yahoo!

Friends with Benefits is the best book on social media marketing that I’ve read to date. Why is it so great?

Reason 1
My friends wrote it and 3/4s of the way through there’s a screenshot that includes one of my Facebook updates.

Ok, no really, there are better reasons than that.

Reason 2
Friends with Benefits is one of the few books that offers social media marketing case studies with accompanying stats. Although every company has to set their own baseline for metrics, having a reasonable idea of what to expect is critical. Much of this private info is never shared, which means it is hard for a marketer who’s new to social media to answer the boss’s question, “what do I get for this investment in social media.”

Reason 3
There are great passages and quotes.

“The connections we make with other people online are real.”

“The Internet has become a public venue where the audience responds to news reports, suggests stories to cover, and even reports on stories.”

“Marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. A successful campaign is usually the result of a hundred correct decisions and actions.”

Reason 4
Friends with Benefits answers the question, “Why would I want social media when my standard marketing practices are safe and known?”

If you’re a marketer dependent on mass media, then understanding web 2.0 as explained by Barefoot and Szabo will shoot you light years ahead of your competition.

The quick history in the first chapter helps establish the customs and culture that make up the web today; and how PR professionals can work within that framework.

Friends with Benefits is a must-read for social media marketers and those new to the field. There’s stuff for everyone, including the case studies I mentioned above, the reasonable expectations set around metrics, the how-to checklists and the great tips on the tools.

Who is Friends with Benefits for?
Anyone who wants:

• More website visitors
• More incoming links
• More subscribers to your RSS feeds
• More views of your content on video- and photo-sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr
• More references to your company, products, and services on blogs, podcasts, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, …
• More followers on Twitter
• Better search engine optimization
• More genuine interactions with your customers

Good job Darren and Julie! I look forward to seeing the book in stores.

Darren and Julie with Andre Charland from Nitobi at IMC Vancouver 2008

Download Chapter 4 from the No Starch site: “Netiquette: Miss Manners for the Web” (PDF)

The Magicians by Lev Grossman is a novel about a bunch of kids who end up at a magic school–a daring feat (or author death wish) considering the world of Harry Potter hasn’t left our collective consciousness. But Grossman’s intention is to tie into the collective consciousness, in particular to the works of CS Lewis, Ursula LeGuin and JK Rowling. And he pulls it off. Grossman does, afterall, hold degrees in comparative literature from Harvard and Yale, and, based on writing style, is well versed in the traditions of modern fantasy and literary fiction.

Like Harry Potter, we have a couple of trios in the mix. Our main group being intellectually precocious high school senior Quentin Coldwater and his best friends James and Julia (who happen to be a couple). Quentin is our Harry, James and Julia our Ron and Hermione. But this trio doesn’t quite work out.

Quentin and James set off for their Princeton interviews. The interviewer turns up dead. The paramedic on scene is a bit odd and tries to give them envelopes with their names on them, and only Quentin accepts. Bonds are broken. Quentin moves to the next level.

The next level being an examination and then acceptance at Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy.

Quote: The Magicians by Lev Grossman. Page 23
The test also changed as he took it. The reading-comprehension section showed him a paragraph that vanished as he read it, then quizzed him on its contents. Some new kind of computerized paper–hadn’t he read somewhere that somebody was working on that? Digital ink? Amazing resolution, though. He was asked to draw a rabbit that wouldn’t keepstill as he drew it–as soon as it had paws it scratched itself luxuriously and then went hopping off around the page, nibbling at the other questions, so that he had to chase it with the pencil to finish filling in the fur. He wound up pacifying it with some hastily sketched radishes and then drawing a fence around it to keep it in line.The Magicians by Lev Grossman (Viking)

I like reading first novels because for the most part book publishers are wary of publishing first-time authors. They feel that no one will buy a book by someone they’ve never heard of. The upside to this misguided logic is that first novels are a highly filter commodity–only the best get through–which means that first novels can sometimes be the best novels you read in a given year.

Such is the case with The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley.

Our heroine is 11-year-old Flavia de Luce, an aspiring chemist who knows the ins and outs of various poisons and their affect on the human body. The novel’s opening scene is of Flavia locked in a closet. Her contemptuous older sisters have bound and gagged her. A cunning lass, Flavia frees herself and sets out to poison her oldest sister via the beauty queen’s lipstick.

Set in the 1950s, Flavia’s Bucksaw home (a decaying English mansion with a chem lab in the attic) is the site of a murder. Flavia discovers the dead man in the cucumber patch. He happens to be the man her father argued with hours before. There’s a dead crow, a crazy cook, a gardener with post-traumatic stress, an affable detective, a couple of side stories of deception, and a lot of investigative work by 11-year-old Miss Flavia.

Quote:
Chapter 12

Feely and Daffy were sitting on a flowered divan in the drawing room, wrapped in one another’s arms and wailing like air-raid sirens. I had taken a few steps into the room to join in with them before Ophelia spotted me.

‘Where have you been, you little beast?’ she hissed, springing up and coming at me like a wildcat, her eyes swollen and red as cycle reflectors. ‘Everyone’s been searching for you. We thought you’d drowned. Oh! How I prayed you had!’

Welcome home, Flave, I thought.

‘Father’s been arrested,’ Daffy said matter-of-factly. ‘They’ve taken him away.’

‘Where?’ I asked.

‘How should we know?’ Ophelia spat contemptuously. ‘Wherever they take people who have been arrested, I expect. Where have you been?’

‘Bishop’s Lacey or Hinley?’

‘What do you mean? Talk sense, you little fool.’

‘Bishop’s Lacey or Hinley,’ I repeated. ‘There’s only a one-room police station at Bishop’s Lacey, so I don’t expect he’s been taken there. The County Constabulary is at Hinley. So they’ve likely taken him to Hinley.’

‘They’ll charge him with murder,’ Ophelia said, ‘and then he’ll be hanged!’ She burst into tears again and turned away.

For a moment I almost felt sorry for her.

You can just hear the villain muttering, ‘ I would have gotten away with it too if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!’

If you like Scooby-Doo, Miss Marple, The Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency and quirky fiction, this is for you.

Full marks Alan Bradley on your first novel!

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie on Amazon

Published by Doubleday Canada

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks is worth the praise. Hanna Heath, an Australian rare book expert and conservationist, is called upon to analyze and conserve the famed Sarajevo Haggadah.

The Sarajevo Haggadah was created in the middle of the 14th century, the golden age of Spain. There are many theories about its creation and the identity of the artist who illuminated it. What is known is that there are two coats of arms, one representing a rose and the other a wing. The book is beautiful and has the mysterious history of a beautiful, unidentified woman. It is one of the earliest Jewish volumes ever to be illuminated with images.

See the illuminations …

The Haggadah survived the Inquisition, the Second World War, the Bosnian War, and countless other close calls.

In Brooks’ novel, the Haggadah must also survive a form of repatriation.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Geraldine Brooks delivers a great unraveling.

People of the Book in Google Book Search
Geraldine Brooks
Penguin Books

People of the Book melds the known stories of the Haggadah with the imagined stories of Geraldine Brooks.

Girl #3 by Nichole McGill is a great literary, thriller about a girl who is almost abducted. It can be scary being a kid, a girl in particular. What I loved about Nichole’s writing is how she captures the faulty thought process of teens. Basically they’ve been on earth long enough to be given responsibilities, like a paper route, but at 14 have been navigating the world without parental interference for less than 4 years. In terms of making decisions, like what to do if a guy is stalking you on your paper route, they don’t have a very complex understanding of the world and the adults within it.

Pitched for age group 12+, I happily enjoyed it at age 30+. I think it would be a great book club book for those groups of mom-daughters who need fictional accounts to have conversations about boys, sex, trust, bullying, divorce and behaviour that is ok.

Girl #3 is a fast-paced novel about 14-year-old Syd and a guy who stalks her on her paper route. It’s about about her fury at friends’ betrayals over boys, boys’ betrayals over sexual innocence, the betrayals of adults who don’t take teens seriously and the perceived betrayal of parents divorcing.

Girl #3 by Nichole McGill on Amazon
Published by Key Porter Books