Читать книгу The Zen of Social Media Marketing - Shama Hyder - Страница 7

Foreword

Shama Hyder starts off her book with a scene from The Matrix. I know the scene well. It’s a little bit of philosophy thrown into Hollywood and made simple to consume. Shama’s right for giving us this gem; The Matrix seems to have motivated a lot of us to think differently about how we live online, and how business works.

I know. I wrote about The Matrix a few different times in Trust Agents. We could have just written, “To be a trust agent is to know how to be Neo,” and it would’ve been a shorter book.

There is a Zen to social media. There is a way. Shama’s right about that. And her way—her thoughts, her experiments, her recommendations in this book—is one that can get a lot of people closer to the prize than anything they might intuit and do on their own.

Business rules are different now. Don’t believe me? How are the banks in the United States doing? How are the three big carmakers? How are small businesses doing? You want to keep marketing the way companies have been for the last fifty years? Not a good idea, I’m afraid.

We’re writing new code, and Shama knows it.

There’s human code out there all about how human you can be, how you can connect with people, and what that means for business. I’m flying all over the planet right now writing new versions of this code for companies, showing them how to be human. The goal is simple: explain to people that, while face-to-face is just as important as it ever was, now we’ve got all kinds of new tools that let us tighten bonds in between those in-person moments.

These tools leave a wake of data behind them. Follow these invisible trails of data and you can smell new customers, new opportunities. New networks don’t form inside your inbox. New phone numbers don’t start following you (frankly, that’s probably a good thing). Social media provides the links and connections that allow these networks to form. I’ve taken to calling Twitter the Serendipity Engine, because that’s what it harnesses: serendipity. And you, too, can harness it for your business.

Shama has a way of teaching this new code—her business-savvy Zen approach—that fits the business you’re in, the person you are, and the results you want. I might do a few things differently, but we all might. (After all, if you see Buddha on the road, kill him. Isn’t that the quote?) And you need to consider what parts of her approach you’ll benefit most from implementing. But ignoring her isn’t a good move.

Get into The Zen of Social Media Marketing. Keep a notepad file handy. Write down notes. Seek out everything that makes sense for you. Start setting up some next moves based on what you learn. Shama will show you.

Meanwhile, I’m waiting for the white rabbit.

—Chris Brogan,

coauthor of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal best seller Trust Agents