How is your social media strategy working these days? (I know, this can be a confounding topic for many folks.) If you have room for improvement in this area, you may want to pick up Michael Stelzner’s “Launch: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition.” Note that this is not a book on general business, sales, or marketing practices; it is exclusively about leveraging nontraditional media such as email newsletters, virtual conferences, social networks, etc. to grow one’s business. A more complete and accurate subtitle would have had the words “Internet Marketing” wedged in there somewhere, but now I’m splitting hairs.
Stelzner uses rocket ship analogies throughout his 230+ page work, including a chapter entitled Starting Your Mission Plan. One of the more meaningful takeaways can be found in this chapter, through which he challenges the reader to set a goal of being declared one of the world’s leading experts on a given topic. That’s a pretty daunting assignment, right? Well, it’s less so if one follows Stelzner’s plan of making that lofty goal the result of a ten-step process. By turning the mountain into more manageable molehills, the author gives the reader confidence that worldwide fame and glory might actually be achievable. The catch, of course, is finding the time to start the process by, say, crafting a remarkable white paper, but he charts the course for that as well. He’s a white paper guru and therefore takes the reader through some basic goal-setting stages to drive commitment to writing and circulating an expert piece.
And here’s the one annoyance about “Launch”: Stelzner plugs his website dozens of times throughout the book. Granted, SocialMediaExaminer.com is an outstanding (and free) resource for anyone in any business who’s trying to figure out the world of social media and he has built a massive following in the less than two years since its inception. But if you’re the kind of person who is easily bothered by shameless plugs, well, consider yourself warned. And it’s a shame, really, because Stelzner truly delivers valuable ideas through his site and the book. If I didn’t feel compelled to warn you about his penchant for constant self-promotion, I’d be talking up the author’s Elevation Principle, a provocative concept built around giving away one’s valuable ideas as a core marketing strategy. Should you and your team hawk free ideas in your web marketing in an effort to entice the recipient? Pick up “Launch” and decide for yourself.